The IEC casts its ballot with Microsoft technologies platform

5 December 2000 saw 48 percent of South Africa`s 18-million registered voters make their way to nearly 15 000 voting stations around the country to cast their ballots in the recent municipal elections. Behind the scenes, project partners Accenture and Microsoft South Africa focused on providing the technology infrastructure to enable the collecting, capturing, processing and verifying the election results quickly and accurately.

When preparing for the elections, the project team collaborated on the infrastructure development and the application of appropriate software technology. "Our first priority was to develop a solution that would ensure the election results were processed and verified correctly and promptly," says Pierre Dalton, a partner at Accenture.

Accenture, together with Microsoft and its partners developed the infrastructure, which functioned across a satellite based Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting over 1 500 workstations to a central Pretoria-based bureau, as well as to nine provincial centres. This infrastructure accumulated the results for ward, local council and district councils election results, from the 15 000 voting districts across the country and fed the data to a central hub. Continuous regional media updates were fed to broadcast media and to the election Website keeping citizens up to date with the electoral process.

"The Microsoft solution offers a scalable and secure platform providing 99.9 percent operations reliability," continues Dalton. "It is critical that the technology platform is flexible enough to meet demands as they arise, as well as being consistently reliable during the election period."

During the time of the election, the Microsoft Consulting Services team and support group were responsible for an architectural review, technical risk management and second line technical support for the project. "Our objective was to reduce the IEC`s technical risk and ensure the technology supported the election process," says Markus Muller, partner development manager at Microsoft South Africa.

Products comprising up the solution included: Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, the Windows NT database server providing reliable, scalable and agile data warehousing solutions; the Microsoft Windows NT operating system platform, providing a single infrastructure to support a number of services, including file and print applications, communications and Internet and intranet hosting. Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Internet Explorer provided the front end for the hundreds of workstations capturing the voting results. Other applications used in the development of the IEC computing infrastructure included Microsoft Transaction Server and Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5.

"The use of technology has streamlined a lengthy and tedious administrative process," says Muller. "This project provided some of the most rural parts in South Africa with their first ever computing infrastructure, and demonstrates how government and the private sector can work effectively together."