Myriad of errors mar UK e-voting trials

Right on cue, the Electoral Commission has published findings from a number of UK e-voting trials, and just as expected, they went about as awry as they possibly could. Within the 24-page document resides a comedy of errors that would certainly put any other system on an eternal blacklist, but the blind faith in e-voting continues to allow events such as these to complicate democratic procedures. For starters, it was noted that the "use of electronic counting significantly increased the total cost of delivering these elections compared with a manual count," and furthermore, the scanning of ballot papers "took a lot longer than expected due to the need to scan certain batches more than once." Needless to say, the amount of mishaps involved are far too numerous to cover in this space, but hopefully the UK will take our interestingly administered warning to heart now that it has experienced similar turmoil. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via The Inquirer, image courtesy of BBC]

[mikael @ Aug 3rd 2007 5:34PM]

Nice article!

http://q-biq.bloggagratis.se

[Mutant @ Aug 3rd 2007 5:47PM]

Will engadget cover a revolutionary and highly accurate voting technology like paper ballots? Can paper and a stubby pencil qualify as a gadget?

[Revrant2394 @ Aug 4th 2007 4:29AM]

I'm getting right sick of this e-voting stuff, it's obviously inferior to just about every single other way around, some of which have existed not long after the vote made it's inception.

Ah, progress.

[Lamerz @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:21PM]

Ummm, it's not "myriad of" .....

When will people learn how to use that word?

[boss sauce @ Aug 3rd 2007 11:04PM]

This bug me too, but it's correct according to Webster. The problem is its overuse by people trying to sound smart-- it has the opposite effect!

[Vanilla Spice @ Aug 5th 2007 9:31PM]

No, I believe it is correct, when referring to an unspecified figure, myriad is both a noun and an adjective. In the headline, the term myriad is analogous to "thousands" or "large number", and you wouldn't write "Thousands errors mar UK ..." or "Large number errors mar UK ...".

"Myriad of" is as correct as "myriad", there is no question about that. For that matter, "myriads" is valid also, like "hundreds" and "millions" are.

[oxfdblue @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:58PM]

It is definately time to just use paper ballots and a pen.

As low tech as can be, but it would seem to be the best solution.

www.theforgottenborough.com

[Matt Petty @ Aug 7th 2007 11:00AM]

The excellent UK Open Rights Group performed their own observations of the trials, and came up with the following recommendation: DON'T

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main