Mad rush for results

Johannesburg, 24 Apr 2009

Following Web site troubles and unanticipated traffic volumes, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) says it has increased capacity and is "confident" the final day of counting will go smoothly.

Chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula said in a statement that high traffic volumes had been experienced at the Results Operations Centre (ROC) as vote counting picked up.

"We have increased our bandwidth to deal with the traffic increases and are anxious, but confident that everything will run smoothly," she noted.

The ROC is an integral part of the election results management process and includes a results system technical help-desk, a results problem-resolution authority, an electoral operations nerve centre, an IT division and a geographic information system group, and an IEC intranet to provincial operations centres.

The IEC also stated Web site problems had been resolved, but refused to provide details of the problem. The IEC Web site crashed on election day and experienced some downtime yesterday - both instances which are believed to be a result of surges in traffic volumes.

The IEC said it could not yet confirm how many visitors it had received over the past two days.

The Web site previously experienced problems as usage surged. The service crashed during the first voter registration weekend in November 2008, with over one million users recorded. The IEC then pledged to spend R3 million to upgrade the site`s capacity and improve its features.

During the February 2009 registration weekend, the site had more than 68 000 hits over a two-day period and no problems were reported.

Elections search

With the downtime experienced by the IEC`s Web site both yesterday morning and on election day, many South Africans have had to rely on online news sources for updated results.

Jason Norwood-Young, technical manager for the Mail & Guardian online, says the traffic experienced over the past two days indicated the great search for information online.

"The Mail & Guardian Online experienced a significant increase in traffic yesterday, with 541 849 page views and 120 489 visitors, according to Google Analytics. The South African public was clearly hungry for reliable, readable, up-to-the-minute reporting as the results of our elections started coming in, and turned to the Web to get that information.

"We`ve never seen traffic like it," he adds.

Tech troubles

While the IEC states it has not experienced any significant technological problems during this election period, there have been several technology-related problems.

In its drive to ensure over 20 million voters were registered for the 2009 national elections, the IEC used technology as a key feature of it service. Some R200 million was allocated for the technology budget and 30 000 new handheld scanning devices - called Zip-Zaps - were purchased.

Key problems the IEC faced included browser incompatibilities on its Web site, which restricted access to non-Microsoft users. The Web site`s capacity was also upgraded as the site failed to cope with high traffic volumes. It was also reported that several voting stations across the country had broken or unreliable scanners.