Can you count on it?

With this year’s election looking like it is going to go down to the wire, every vote will be absolutely crucial in determining not just which MSPs get elected, but also who will be installed as First Minister and depending on how many seats his/her party win, the bargaining power it would hold over potential coalition partners.

With this in mind it would be reasonable to expect that the system for counting these votes would be thoroughly tested and a certain amount of confidence could be placed in it.

In the past, manual hand counting was the tried and tested way of counting votes. Whilst in no way was this 100% accurate, there was a sufficient level of accuracy to provide a fair result. Very close results were automatically recounted in any case.

In June 2006, the Secretary for State and the Scottish Secretary announced that the 2007 Scottish Parliament and council elections would be counted electronically. This is to be the UK’s biggest test yet of the electronic vote counting system. The change was mainly to do with the fact that the council elections will be decided by STV proportional representation and this electronic counting system would be easier to use.

Fair enough. But safeguards have to be in place to ensure the integrity of the vote. For instance, in California, 1% of the vote has to be hand counted as well as machine counted to ensure that the machines are counting properly.

Does the Scottish elections have a similar check in place? No.

Two US experts on the accuracy of electronic counting systems have said that the Scottish system lacks enough independent safeguards.

However, deputy Scottish Secretary, David Cairns said, "People should have the confidence to know that if things do go catastrophically wrong, we will still have the bits of paper and could do a manual recount if needed."

I think Mr Cairns is spectacularly missing the point. In this election things don’t need to go "catastrophically" wrong to change the outcome. It is too close for that.

If that wasn’t enough to test the confidence of the most optimistic person, then along comes more bad news in the form of postal votes.

With the police being alerted to election fraud, the Scotsman reported that, "The Holyrood election has been left wide open to fraud on a potentially massive scale after ministers scrapped checks designed to prevent abuse of postal votes."

And why did ministers scrap checks designed to prevent abuse of postal votes? You guessed it! Because of the new electronic counting system. It was feared that too many innovations might overwhelm the system!

It’ll be interesting to see what happens….