THE company behind the electronic count for last week's elections is to pay thousands of pounds in compensation for the chaos at Edinburgh's count.
DRS Data Services originally claimed delays which occurred at election counts across the country had nothing to do with their machines and were due to the "unprecedented volume" of spoiled ballot papers which had to be checked.
But Edinburgh retu
rning officer Tom Aitchison said DRS had now accepted it had not met the required performance standards set down in the contract for the count in the Capital.
Further talks must now be held to work out the exact amount of compensation due.
The company is almost certain to be forced to make similar pay-outs for problems at other count centres where there were problems with the computers.
The total cost of introducing electronic counting for both Scottish Parliament and council elections across Scotland last Thursday was £8.8 million.
Under the electronic counting arrangements, results of the Scottish Parliament elections in Edinburgh's six seats had been roughly scheduled for declaration, two at a time, no later than 2am, 4am and 6am last Friday.
But by 4.50am, none of the results was available at the count centre in the Royal Highland Centre at Ingliston.
Mr Aitchison told candidates and their supporters only two of the seats could be finalised within the next hour and the count for the other four was being abandoned and restarted at midday. The delay also had a knock-on effect on the timing of the local election results that afternoon.
Today Mr Aitchison said there had been no problem with the scanners used to read the ballot papers, but the computer had not been able to produce the information at the end of the process to allow the results to be declared.
He said: "There was a meeting between myself and colleagues and representatives from DRS. Both parties are carrying out a complete review to understand more fully the nature of the technical problem that occurred.
"DRS have recognised that technical problems occurred and this will lead to invoking some of the penalty clauses in the contract."
DRS said it was holding a series of meetings with councils around Scotland and could not comment on the contractual situation until these had been completed.
The Electoral Commission, which produces a report after every election, was due to publish its assessment of last week's elections, including the count chaos, by the end of June. But it is understood the report is now not expected until at least the end of August.
Mr Aitchison said as returning officer he always conducted a post-election review.
"We have started that work and I would hope to have it completed before the summer holidays, but we may need to wait and see what the national review says as well."
He said he would report to the council's cross-party consultative group on elections.
Mr Aitchison admitted: "Public confidence has taken a knock over what happened last week."
But he said he thought testing of the electronic counting in the run-up to the elections had been adequate.
He said: "We all felt there had been national testing and an opportunity locally for some testing too. We went into it reasonably confident."
The next elections due in Scotland are the ones for the European Parliament in June 2009, with a Westminster general election possibly around the same time or earlier. It is not expected electronic counting will be used for either of these.
