Most of the problems that arise do so when people rush things, or feel that it is so important to get a result out in a hurry that making sure it is accurate takes a back seat. They blame the media, but the media aren't the people in charge of these things.

That especially seems to be a major problem over in the USA, with the ridiculous spectacle of November 2000 being the most dramatic example of what can go wrong.

I mean, you have absurd stuff like declarations of the poll in one half of the country before people in the other half have even finished voting. And these are on the basis of votes being counted before all the postal votes have even come in. What's the hurry?

Things like that get in the way of having a fair vote. And that gets made worse when it is clear that the people running things are more interested in getting a fast result, and in getting the one that suits their politics, than in ensuring that the vote is fair.

It seems pretty certain that electronic voting in this kind of system and this kind of climate is just going to be used in the same way, and make things even worse. They'll be declaring provisional results within minutes of the polls opening, and skewing the results. "What's the point in voting - we've lost"; "What's the point in voting, we've won."

And the stupid thing is that the neophiliacs in charge in this country are set on copying what they see happening across the Atlantic. Copying the bad things that is, not the good ones.

And on top of that, there's the potential for corrupting the entire vote system. Much easier than stuffing ballot boxes or voting the dead. It's tailor made for a totalitarian system.