IEC ponders e-votes

As the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) gears up for about 20 million South Africans to make their cross next Wednesday, electronic voting could be in the pipeline as the commission is pondering the seemingly futuristic technology.

More than 23 million people are registered to vote in this year's municipal elections, and the IEC has printed 70.5 million ballot papers, for the first time printing the sheets in colour. Previously, only national election ballots were printed in colour.

However, reams of paperwork, physical voting and standing in queues could soon become a thing of the past, as the commission is exploring whether electronic voting will become a reality.

An IEC insider suggests SA could roll out electronic voting for the next national elections, on a pilot basis. Two years ago, former president Kgalema Motlanthe said electronic voting booths could be a reality at the 2014 general elections.

Three years ago, chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula said SA wasn't ready to make the move to electronic voting. She said the cost was prohibitive and there are “challenges associated with electronic voting, which even so-called developed economies like the US are still grappling with”.

Home affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma recently hinted at the possibility of e-voting becoming a reality. She said the commission was putting together a study on the possible use of electronic voting.

One of the challenges around electronic voting is that there isn't a paper trail, which makes it difficult to verify votes. People are also suspicious of electronic votes, questioning whether counting can be done accurately, said Tlakula.

According to a recent study by the Human Sciences Research Council, 56% of South Africans polled think electronic voting is a good idea, but 47% thought it might introduce more fraud in the process. More than half of the people polled thought the IEC would be successful in implementing electronic voting.

For next week's elections, votes will be tallied and result sheets will then be scanned and submitted electronically to the election hub, in Pretoria. There, results will be displayed live on electronic boards as they come in.

IEC chairman Brigalia Bam, speaking at the launch of the results operation centre this week, said the “numerous computers that we see in this hall and the giant screens on this podium will soon come alive and reflect the names of the numerous parties and candidates that will appear on the tally board as part of the results that will be captured on 18 May”.

Until then, the boards show zero until the first results start trickling in, and will remain live until the results are officially announced. The IEC has established an operation centre since 1999 to function as a “clearing” house for election results.

Bam explains that scanning the results slips from each of the 20 859 voting districts and then submitting them electronically to the hub allows results to be viewed by political parties. “This process has served us well and embodies sufficient controls to ensure that any inadvertent errors are detected and corrected.”

The IEC says it's ready for voting day. “Our plans for these elections have been made several months ago, and what we have been doing recently was merely to implement months and months of systematic planning and preparation,” says Bam.

According to the commission's 2010 annual report, it spent just over R80 million on ICT for the year to March 2010, of which R18 million went into equipment.

The technology behind voting has come a long way since 1994, when SA held its first democratic elections.

In the first elections, voters weren't required to register and there wasn't a voters' roll. South Africans could vote anywhere in the country and the IEC had to plan logistics carefully. The electoral process relied on telecommunications and computer technology more than any other African nation in history.

A national communication network had to be designed and implemented by the IEC with the assistance of the local telecoms sector. Telephones and a high-frequency radio link up connected IEC offices, counting stations and the central communications centre. For rugged terrains in former homelands, portable satellite terminals were used.

Four years later, the IEC had to put together a national voters' role when the Electoral Act came into effect.

In the run-up SA's second national elections in 1999, the IEC developed a satellite-based wide area network in 526 locations around the country, opening direct communication channels to local authorities, including rural areas where there wasn't much telecoms infrastructure.

The challenge was enormous: on election day, national and provincial elections, nine provinces, 436 local electoral officers, 807 municipalities, 14 650 voting districts and 18 million registered voters.

To overcome these daunting logistics, the IEC turned to Accenture to establish a complete IT solution. Datacentrix was awarded the supply and installation of Hewlett-Packard networking components. Microsoft provided the software and consulting services necessary to implement the solution and Datacentrix provided logistical support for the project.

The IEC had to register all eligible voters, which meant scanning bar codes on ID books, which were rescanned on election day and checked against the voters' role.

Results were submitted telephonically to 600 call centre operators in the Pretoria-based hub, sent to four fax servers that stored 41 000 faxes, as well as being sent electronically.

In 2000, the IEC won the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the government and non-profit organisations category for “innovative applications of information technology that benefit society”.

In 2004, the IEC used technology extensively to communicate with voters. South Africans could verify their registration status through SMS and the Web site was updated to provide information to voters. The commission also established a call centre with an automated, computerised voice response system.

Two years later, the IEC extended its SMS service to provide responses to requests such as when voting stations opened and closed. It received 365 000 SMS requests. Land-lines were installed to the 90 biggest municipal offices and bandwidth was quadrupled to the remaining 180 centres. More than 70% of the results were submitted through Telkom land-lines.

In 2008, the commission quadrupled spending on ICT, earmarking R200 million for the 2009 election, up from a previous average of R50 million. A year later, the last national elections, the IEC implemented scanning of results slips for the first time.

More than 38 000 result slips were printed with barcodes and scanned at the results capturing sites to provide a visual image paired to an electronic result. The use of barcodes enabled the automation of linking the scanned image with an electronic record of the captured results.

For these elections, Telkom, HP, Accenture and Internet Solutions are sponsoring the IEC and will provide assorted services on the day. None of the companies have provided clarity as to what services they will provide.