I am satisfied that Friday’s (July 31) shambles, which forced the Beijing versus Almaty contest for the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics to be re-staged as a paper ballot after problems with the original electronic vote, was the result of a technical malfunction and not anything more sinister.

However, the process of thinking about what happened has made me realise that the IOC’s modus operandi on such highly-charged occasions is less than ideal.

The procedure at the moment is that the satisfactory conduct of the vote is monitored by three scrutineers.

These are IOC members - on Friday (July 31), they happened to be Nicole Hoevertsz from Aruba, Frank Fredericks from Namibia and Patrick Chamunda from Zambia.

This means that, unless they are from the country of one or other of the bidders which plainly wouldn’t be right, they are also part of the electorate and hence have a stake in the contest; they vote.

Unless I am much mistaken, this trio of scrutineers know the outcome of any given vote within seconds of members casting their ballots - how could they fulfil their function were this not so?

This puts them in a privileged position compared with the rest of their colleagues, the bulk of the electorate.

Normally, in a two-horse race, there would be one sole round of voting; so this would not really matter.

If you think about what happened on Friday though, the three scrutineers would presumably have known the outcome of the botched first electronic vote, whereas the other 82 members with voting entitlements, would not.

The trio would thus have embarked on the second paper vote in full knowledge of the likely outcome, in stark contrast to the rest of their colleagues.

This fundamental inequality among voters cannot be right in a body which now aspires to the highest corporate governance standards.

OK, Friday’s vote was a freak, in the sense that it needed to be re-run for reasons that could not really have been anticipated.

But does this situation not regularly occur in IOC votes featuring more than two rival candidates?

Think about, for example, the culmination of the race for the 2016 Summer Games in Copenhagen in 2009.

This featured four cities - Rio de Janeiro (the winners), Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago.

After the first round of voting, in which Chicago was eliminated to gasps of disbelief in the media centre, it would have been pretty clear to anyone in possession of the voting figures (i.e. the scrutineers) that the Brazilian candidate was likely to win.

In such circumstances, there must be an element of temptation, if you voted for the eliminated city, or did not harbour strong feelings about who ought to win, to switch your second-round vote to the candidate likely to emerge victorious.

I don’t believe for a moment that an IOC scrutineer would actually do that, but - again - it cannot be right for some members of the electorate to be in possession of key information that the bulk of their colleagues simply cannot be privy to.

So what should the IOC do?

My initial thought was that it should press the eminent judicial figures recently elected to its Ethics Commission into service as scrutineers.

It was pointed out to me, however, that this could - in the event of a complaint or appeal - produce a situation in which these arbiters were asked to pass judgement on their own work; this plainly would not be right either.

I don’t think the IOC administration is the route to go, which leaves a third option: hiring a professional third-party specialist organisation to oversee the process.  

Such a move would not have prevented the technical glitch that embarrassed the IOC on Friday, but it would constitute much better corporate governance practice.

It is conceivable that it might even forestall fresh embarrassment in future.