Political

More London election errors: the results have the wrong number of wards

I’ve already blogged about how London Elects admitted to failing to count all the votes in the London Mayor election. Now looking through the detailed figures I see that Lambeth has sprouted two extra wards.

What seems to have happened is that some, but only some, of the ballot boxes in Brixton Hill and Thornton wards were reported in to the central number crunching venue in City Hall with typos in their names – and so the official results have votes for both Brixton Hill and Brxiton Hill (note the x and i) and also both Thornton and Thirnton (note the third letter).

Not a huge difference you might think, but what it highlights (again) is the weakness of the cross-checking and auditing process. What these errors means is that the total number of wards included in the official figures is wrong – and you would have expected something like “have we got the right number of wards here?” to feature in any auditing rules.

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