LONDON Mayor Ken Livingstone sent his council officers to monitor a pilot electronic vote counting system used for the first time in County Durham.

Three district authorities in County Durham - Derwentside, Chester-le-Street and Wear Valley - held a joint, all-postal ballot for the local government elections last Thursday and used machinery to count the votes electronically .

The Greater London Assembly is planning to use the e-count system for its elections next spring and wanted to get a first-hand view of how it works.

Two officers from its elections team observed the system in action as votes were tallied in Stanley.

A GLA spokesman said: "This is the first time that three authorities have held this sort of count together, using this technology.

"We are doing a similar thing next year, where various London boroughs will have combined counts, so we wanted to learn as much as we can about the process before next year."

The votes for all three County Durham authorities taking part were fed into scanners operated by private firm Data Research Services, at the Louisa Centre in Stanley.

The electronic count was much faster and more accurate than counting the votes manually, with the machines capable of processing 7,500 ballot papers an hour.

The equipment works by scanning a barcode on each ballot paper, then assigning the vote to the relevant ward or parish. The barcode is unique, reducing the chance of electoral fraud.

Where there is doubt over the voter's intent, an image is saved for on-screen checking by the returning officer, who then enters the vote - or the reason for the paper's rejection - into a database.

The postal vote, which aimed to raise voter interest in the local elections, was hailed a major success. About half of the 160,000 people eligible to vote returned their ballot papers.

Turnout in Derwentside rose from 32 per cent in 1999 to more than 56 per cent. In Chester-le-Street, the turnout was up from 29 per cent to more than 50per cent.

Mike Bonser, returning officer for Derwentside, said: "We are absolutely delighted. The aim of the exercise was to increase voter turnout and it has certainly worked."

He said the system had been much easier to operate than the traditional method of using polling stations.

"It has been a smooth operation and logistically, makes much more sense. In the past, we have operated around 100 polling stations across the district and they all had to be manned. The new system was definitely more effective.