page_title: 2008 London mayoral election
section_title: Vote counting
hierarchical_section_title: 2008 London mayoral election / Voting system / Vote counting
caption_attribution_description: London Elections 2008, Excel count centre. Ballot box bar code scanner.
context_page_description: The 2008 London mayoral election for the office of Mayor of London, England, was held on 1 May 2008 and was won by Conservative Party candidate Boris Johnson.
  It was the third London mayoral election, the previous elections being the first election in May 2000 and the second election in June 2004.
  Boris Johnson became the second Mayor of London and the first Conservative to hold the office since its creation in 2000. This became the first London Mayoral election in which the incumbent mayor was defeated by a challenger. The popular vote achieved by Boris Johnson remained the largest polled by winning mayoral candidate until Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan, received 1,148,716 first-preference votes in 2016.
context_section_description: Votes were counted using an optical scan voting system, where a computer scans the ballot papers and registers the votes. A digital image of the ballot paper was also taken so if there were problems with any of the papers, they could be examined by humans. In 2008, due to the large turnout, the counting took over 15 hours. However, if counted manually the process could - according to London Elects - take up to 3 days. Election observers have declared "there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters’ intentions." London Elects have been unable to publish an audit of some of the software used in the count. The Open Rights Group reports that there was equipment directly connected to the counting servers to which observers had limited or no access and that the presence of error messages, bugs and system freezes indicates poor software quality.
caption: E-counting vote scanner
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