Next year's London elections must count

I got news yesterday that the website of the body overseeing next year's elections for the Mayor and Assembly for London has just been relaunched: http://www.londonelects.org.uk/ if you're interested.

A lot of coverage was - rightly - devoted to the voting debacle in Scotland earlier this year when tens of thousands of votes were incorrectly cast because of badly designed ballot papers and the multitude of different systems being used.

But what's far less widely known is that in 2004, the last time the Mayor and Assembly were elected, there was an even bigger problem in London with spoilt ballots for exactly the same reason. In some parts of London, up to 18% of all the ballots cast were "spoilt" - not because voters were making some protest about the quality of their candidates, but because the three elections (Mayor, Assembly and European Parliament), which yielded up to five votes per person, were simply baffling to too many people.

I'm really concerned that next year's elections are heading the same way. The Electoral Commission, which oversaw the design of ballots in 2004 and in Scotland this year seems to have done little to accept responsibility or make improvements in the six months since the elections. Although we won't have European Elections next year (because MEPs serve a five-year term) there is still a risk that an unacceptably high number of votes will be mis-cast.

It's up to all of us: politicians, the media, the electoral administrators and yes, the electorate, to make sure that we have an electoral system we can be confident in, which makes voting as easy as possible and - most importantly - where every vote counts.