EU Referendum: Lessons Learned

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s question. I will not tangle with all the things that he raised, but we have a pretty resilient system. The fact that the vast majority of votes cast are pencil or pen marks on bits of paper that are physically counted means that it is basically an impossible system to hack. What we need to be aware of is the vulnerability of electoral registers and systems. The dispersal of our electoral register among different electoral authorities is another source of resilience: there is not one system to hack. However, we need to be aware of what certain countries might want to be seen to be doing—what they might want to be seen to be attempting to influence the result of, or want to be thought to influence the result of. I do not think that any country influenced the result of the leave vote in the EU referendum. I do not think that the result in any election in any major country would have been altered, but we need to understand why certain countries are doing this and what psychological effect they are trying to create by attempting these things, and we need to be alert to the vulnerability of our systems.