Northgate details election business manifesto

Public sector services firm Northgate is eying up the election business, kit and caboodle. A senior executive told The Register this week that the firm is looking at becoming "the whole package" for electronic voting. Russell Osbourne, MD of land and property, said the company is exploring how it might expand its involvement …

[JB]

No!

We use (or try to use) ResourceLink, Northgate's excuse for an HR system. Their support is rubbish and the package is not all it's cracked up to be. God help us all if they get this conract!

[Spleen]

Why?

"Osbourne tacitly acknowledged the vote counting debacle in Scotland, saying that while technology ("intelligent kiosks or whatever it might be") would almost inevitably make its way into elections..."

Why?

Why is it inevitable?

This question - on the rare occasion that it's asked - is never satisfactorily answered. The real answer, of course, is to rig the election, or at least to give the incumbents a bit of a nudge. It's not that electronic voting is easier to cheat - I don't know enough about the technical details to know whether it is or not - but it's certainly possible to cheat (no system is perfect), and the crucial thing is that it *makes it easier to conceal*.

Paper ballots can be rigged, African governments do it all the time, but then you've got to do something with all those bloody boxes of paper. Somebody generally notices when you're burning them or pouring them down a drain. With electronic voting, there's no inconvenient physical evidence. Moreover, people understand the concept of men in sunglasses turning up, confiscating ballot boxes and disappearing with them, whereas falsifying electronic voting is a technical issue and if you told most people that the system had been rigged in such-and-such a way they wouldn't understand.

The question is not whether Labour would stoop to rigging the election, because they would, and they already have. Labour's base is the trade union movement, and they inherit the union mindset that all that matters is to satisfy your group, no matter how much it screws everybody else. (We won't even get into their revolutionary "smear the other candidate as a paedophile" strategy.) The only question is whether we're going to let them do it - then again, we may not have a choice.