Readers comparing this cycle’s published tabulations with earlier ones will find them changed. Timestamps have been removed, and the order in which votes appear has been randomised.

The Electoral Commissioner said the request came in during the week, with the aim of further anonymising ballots, and indicated the new format is likely to stick.

What it costs, and what it buys

The trade is a real one. Timestamps and stable ordering are exactly the material an outside observer would use to audit a count independently — to check that the sheet published matches the sequence in which votes arrived, or to spot a suspicious cluster of submissions.

Removing them narrows what the public can verify for itself, and correspondingly widens the amount that must simply be taken on trust from the Registration Commission.

Set against that: SimDemocracy has struck votes for fraud in consecutive cycles, and the case for making individual ballots harder to trace back to individual voters is not hypothetical. The outgoing Registration Officer reported “significantly fewer” suspicious entries at this count than at the last.

Both things can be true. It is worth being clear that a decision has been made about which one matters more.