Since the transition to democracy more than 20 years ago, South Africa has held numerous national and local elections under the auspices of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). These have been recognised globally as good examples of free and fair elections, and the IEC must take the majority of credit for this.
Nonetheless, the IEC continues to face election-related challenges, says SAS Institute. For example, in the lead-up to the most recent local government elections, a case brought before the Constitutional Court relating to by-elections in Tlokwe highlighted just how important accurate voter information is. The court ruled that the voters' roll needed to include registered voters' residential addresses, where possible.
The voters' roll is critical, as it is used to establish eligibility to vote, to determine the areas in which people can vote, to communicate to citizens when elections occur and where and how to vote, to validate people at the polls, and to audit elections after the fact. Therefore, it seems obvious that the highest quality data possible should be available to the IEC in this regard.
However, this remains a challenge in a country where millions of citizens have no fixed or registered address, and where many others face struggles related to obtaining official identity documents.
SAS has data and analytics solutions that can assist the IEC with regard to ensuring accuracy of such data, suggests Antoinette van Zyl, Practice Lead for Data Quality and Data Integration at SAS.
"For starters, we have solutions that could help with respect to cleaning up voter data with our matching capabilities. So for instance, we can match the data and identify duplicate records, such as might occur if a person has initially registered in Johannesburg and then re-registered following a move to Cape Town. These solutions could also assist with confirming whether the ID numbers being used by registrants are correct and legal," she says.
"SAS already has experience in other countries with this. For example, in Canada - which has approximately 20 million registered voters and a constantly changing registry, due to deaths, immigration etc - the electoral agency lacked the proper, up-to-date tools to maintain a high-quality database. SAS solved this problem by implementing SAS Data Quality solutions designed to help the agency maintain the highest level of data integrity in the electoral database."
A similar approach could be adopted for the IEC should it require it, she adds, pointing out that these data quality solutions can help in eliminating at source the vast majority of data errors.
"SAS could even assist by matching IEC databases against external databases, such as those from SARS and Stats SA, in order to further improve its quality. The company already has a lot of public sector customers, so although we haven't worked with the IEC before, we understand what government data looks like and have experience in this field."
Another area where SAS could play a role, continues Van Zyl, would be if the IEC needed help in exploring voting intentions and forecasting results. The company has already been extremely successful in this regard in Russia she explains, analysing data to more clearly understand which the typical age groups are that are most likely to vote and whether they are male or female.
"Furthermore, we have been able to predict with great accuracy the electoral results, even before the last voting has taken place. This is done by collating information from a range of different sources - including previous voting results, historical trends and even what is currently happening on social media - and modelling this to arrive at the prediction."
"The challenge is to integrate data from a wide range of sources, in order to provide fast and efficient data processing, and expand the scope of analyses. As we have proven in Russia, SAS has both the tools and the experience to do this. Therefore, I have no doubt that we have the technology and the capabilities within our data management suite of products to assist the IEC, should they require it, in a range of ways during the 2019 elections," she concludes.
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