@ALDEParty Congress: election result - Technology 0, Bureaucrats 1

Having been appointed as Congress Returning Officer in a reprise of my double act with Daniel Obst from the FDP in Dublin last time, our instructions were quite simple. "We're using keypads to vote, so all you need to do is look reassuring, confirm that the vote tallies look alright and, once we have an official record of the result, ensure that the individual voting data is destroyed to ensure privacy."

Doesn't everyone have a ballot box at home?

That sounded easy enough, and the system had been tested so, when the election session started, Daniel and I stood at the side of the hall, looking relaxed and confident. As this was the first time that the technology had been used in an ALDE election, the delegates were invited to have a test vote, using historic political figures. It didn't go well, with some keypads freezing, so it was back to the technicians for some swift resetting before another attempt - which didn't run entirely smoothly either.

Time passed, and despite the work of the technicians, it became apparent that delegates were getting restless. And so, it was decided that we would revert to Plan B, using the ballot papers that, with some prescience, had been prepared just in case.

We had less than two and a half hours to issue ballots to more than four hundred voting delegates, get them through a hastily constructed polling station and count two sets of ballot papers but, with the invaluable and unflappable assistance of the ALDE Secretariat, and our counting assistant, Doreen Huddart, who will be a familiar name to those readers from the North East, and Francis Burstin, from Open VLD, Belgium, who happened to be in the room when it was decided that we needed another counting assistant, we were ready to announce a result well inside our deadline.

Lucky that Daniel and I are so unflappable, eh?

For those of you that are interested, the results can be found on Liberal Democrat Voice...