The brave new world of the marrying-up of government, politics and technology continues to have a few teething troubles. A representative of electoral administrators has warned that councils could struggle to count votes in next month's elections because of problems with untried electoral software.

A lack of proper testing means software houses have had to come up with "bolt on" systems for tracking postal votes, which makes them open to all sorts of problems.

It could be the case that legitimate votes may end up being rejected, delaying the count as returning officers resort to the manual checking of thousands and thousands of ballot papers.