PLANS to pioneer e-voting in the Malvern Hills at this spring's local elections have been abandoned.

Last month, the Government announced that Malvern Hills District Council was one of 18 authorities chosen to take part in the most extensive trials of electronic democracy yet.

Voters would have had the chance to cast their vote on May 1 from their home computers, using the Internet.

MHDC was working alongside BT, which would have supplied the systems for the voting trial.

Although MHDC's application was approved by the Government on January 23, BT's application was approved only in part.

The council was then told by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) that the project was reallocated from BT to Unisys.

Nigel Snape, the council's head of legal services, said: "The council had been assigned to a new partner, with whom we had yet to form a working relationship. In effect we were back to square one."

He said the council was very disappointed that it had to withdraw.

"The risk of disruption to the election was too great," he said.

An earlier partnership with QinetiQ, explored last year, had also fallen foul of the ODPM.