So where are they?

UK Missing postal votes:

"SOME 20,000 missing votes became the focus of Britain’s biggest election count early today. Early indications showed that a third of postal votes issued for the 11 constituencies in Birmingham had not been returned."

So where have they gone? I cannot believe in the year 2005 we are incapable of running elections without all this bureaucratic bungling and pollster ineptitude. Britain, at least , got its poll predictions and exit poll count right. We couldn't get the poll predictions even close and I seem to remember our exit polls being out. America got the exit poll skew whiff and the techno polling up the creek. So how come we cannot, when we thing we can work so smartly and efficiently, how come we lose votes, can't count votes, lose bits of papers, have machines which take too long to reboot and heaven knows what? Was it always like this and we've only just woken up because we are more alert or have we become nations of bunglers ? If the postal votes have gone missing I suggest looking in the street behind or in a similar named street or the sender's house. Over here my mail has gone to the house behind mine or it's gone to a street with the name of my surname or it's been returned to me because I was stupid enough to put a sender's address on it. So... where are they??