Automatic vote counting
Time-consuming manual vote counts and ballot boxes could soon be consigned to the history books, thanks to a secure voting system under development by computer scientists at the universities of Surrey and Birmingham.
The system will allow users to place their ballot papers into a box, after which it will be optically scanned and the data processed and encrypted.
No other voting system either in use or currently under development uses such a hybrid combination, which will enable the system to avoid the major drawbacks associated with purely manual and purely electronic voting methods.
As well as eliminating the need for laborious manual counts and recounts, which are complex and expensive to conduct, it will remove the possibility of ballot papers being miscounted, mislaid or marked (and thus invalidated) accidentally or deliberately during a manual vote count.
Similarly, although electronic voting could offer an alternative to manual voting and vote counting, and has been tested in many countries, there are serious concerns over its reliability. Some voters have even claimed that the vote shown to have been registered on the voting screen did not tally with the button they pressed.
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