The 2024 national elections did not go down well for the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). The length and breadth of the country saw long queues when the tablets being used to scan IDs failed.
The IEC abandoned the voter management devices around lunchtime, leaving election officials to manually check people off from the voters’ roll. Some voters abandoned the queues. The commission first piloted the devices at scale in 2021, and then fully deployed them ahead of the general elections on May 29.
The IEC paid R546mn for 40 000 of the devices from a Johannesburg firm called Ren-Form. The company is on record as saying that it was not responsible for the devices’ failure.
But this setback has not derailed the IEC’s tech strategy, says chairperson Mosotho Moepya. “Yes, we were disappointed that the voter management devices didn’t work as planned and stalled the voting process, but this doesn’t mean we are abandoning these tools,” he said, adding that the IEC has taken time to understand what went wrong during the 2024 elections and has since attributed the technical glitch to a software flaw.
According to Moepya, each time an official processed a voter, the app had to complete various tasks, but because everything was routed through a single processing thread, it led to timeouts. When a task timed out, instead of moving on, the app kept retrying, sometimes sending the same request thousands of times for a single voter, slowing the IEC’s system to a crawl. The devices also kept repeatedly checking for internet connectivity, which added even more strain. The error has since been fixed, and the devices have worked well during recent by-elections, Moepya says.
Technology can speed up and streamline elections, but it can also make it harder to see what’s happening behind the scenes, says Moepya. For example, when a ballot is counted by hand in front of observers, the process is visible and verifiable, which is not the case when it’s processed by software. This is why transparency is essential when technology is used in any part of the electoral process, he adds.
It won’t be too long before voting looks very different from what it looks like today.
Mosotho Moepya, IEC
The IEC’s results dashboard was developed and tested in-house, and every part of the development process had to be doublechecked. “Once we had something that did what we wanted it to do, we got the system audited by an IT firm. We also invited political parties and those running for election to bring in their own auditors to review the system. If there are any issues, we make changes until everyone is happy.”
Over the course of an election, there are approximately 500 projects running in concert, says Moepya, most of which are time-bound. “When you consider the complexity of overseeing a municipal election, this number might seem big, but it’s actually quite small.”
Provincial elections are typically more expensive than national elections. There are 4 400 wards nationwide, and each ward and municipality requires a unique ballot, he says, adding that the logistics of getting the correct ballots to the matching ward “aren't easy”.
Automation should offer some efficiencies, and South Africans can now register to vote online. Eligible voters can register to vote, check their registration status, or change their details on the agency’s Voter Portal. The goal, he says, is to minimise congestion at voting stations and to encourage more people to get out and vote. The IEC is also tackling misinformation and disinformation.
During the 2024 national elections, a deepfake video was shared on social media which purported to show [then former] US president Donald Trump endorsing the MK Party. Moepya says false information needs to be flagged quickly. The IEC, with Moxii Africa, which used to be called Media Monitoring Africa, now has a website called Real411, where citizens can report hate speech and disinformation. “We’ve also formed strong relationships with big technology players like TikTok, Google and Meta to establish processes that make it possible to remove harmful content before misleading narratives gain too much traction,” he says.
At present, the commission is combining manual and digital processes to improve efficiency and keep humans in the loop. Moepya says the IEC is using AI to analyse historical data and then uses these insights to better plan for future elections. “Right now, we have about 24 000 voting stations across the country. Each is assigned a barcode, and all data around the location of each station, the number of residents in the area, and the number of registered voters is unique to that voting station. So, we’re talking about a lot of data, which we store and secure on internal servers.”
These insights estimate the number of ballots to be printed and sent to each station, and the number of officials needed at each station on voting day. He again stresses that the IEC must be very cautious about the use of any new technology, such as AI. Acknowledging that AI has great potential to streamline many of the processes involved in running an election, efficiency cannot come at the expense of accuracy.
On paper, the benefits of e-voting are clear. There should be improved accessibility, faster vote counting and result declaration, reduced administrative burden, shorter queues on voting day and a lower chance of human error. But the ballot box remains offline in much of the world. Moepya says any potential benefits don’t outweigh the mixed track record of online voting.
He says digital systems can be vulnerable to cyber threats, system malfunctions and failures. And the lack of a physical audit trail makes it challenging to verify that a digital vote is genuine and untampered with.
“At the upcoming municipal elections, you are going to vote on a ballot paper, and we're going to count it manually. That is where we are right now, but this doesn’t mean things won’t change going forward,” he says.
The IEC has been following the development in electronic voting across the world for more than two decades, and has seen countries invest in, and then roll back, these systems after concerns around security, transparency and reliability. For example, Ireland poured significant funding into e-voting machines in the early 2000s, only f or the project to be scrapped after issues were raised about the technology’s reliability. Similarly, Dutch authorities pulled the plug on computerised ballots and ballot counting in 2017, when an in-depth investigation found that the underlying software would be “easy to hack”.
When election technology is used, and fails, it can disrupt voting, delay results, and even force elections to be rerun. In 2004, in Broward County, Florida, a problem with electronic voting machines caused 134 ballots in a key race to appear blank. And the race came down to the wire, and was decided by just 12 votes. Because the e-voting machines didn’t produce a paper record, there was no way to go back to check who these voters wanted to vote for.
“We are constantly working to improve our electoral processes, looking at what did and didn’t work last time, at what is happening elsewhere and then pivoting our approach accordingly,” he says.
Moepya is adamant that the future of voting will be digital. "It won’t be too long before voting looks very different from what it looks like today. Just 10 years ago, people didn't think banks would ever close branches because so many of their customers were moving online, but that is the reality we live in today. It will happen, I am confident of that, but I don’t know when.”
* Article first published on www.itweb.co.za
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