A tech company has set out to quicken the pace of vote-counting and reduce human error in Maltese elections. A vote counting hall in the country has recently been upgraded to include new machines to improve vote counting at the end of elections, housing a new electronic system for European elections.
The new machines will reportedly scan more than 390,000 ballot paper in less than 7 hours and the results will be announced immediately. While the way people vote will not change, as voters will still manually fill in a paper ballot sheet, with numbers indicating their preferred candidates, the way the results are collated and announced will change.
Naxxar, a town in the northern region of Malta, now has a voting hall with a fully-functional electronic system, which will first be used for the European Parliament and local council elections in May next year and then subsequently during the next Maltese general elections in 2022. According to Malta Today, “the new system will see the old manual method of counting votes ditched in favour of an automated e-Counting process, which will mean less time is taken for all votes to be counted, and the chance of human error is minimised.”
At an event unveiling the new machines, the Chief Electoral Commissioner, Joseph Church, told the press that “two mock counts are planned to identify any teething troubles in the new system, one scheduled for Saturday, and the other for December. The latter will be a full-scale simulation of the counting process for the European elections.”
The tech company providing the electronic system is IDOX, a Scottish company with more than 20 years experience in providing electoral software. The company is partnering with Spanish firm Scytl, which is dealing with the security aspects of the counting.
“The counting engine’s accuracy has been proven through extensive testing,” said IDOX’s regional manager, Trevor Kirkup. “Any votes which are scanned but detected by the system as being problematic – such as when a number isn’t written clearly – will be sent to an adjudication section for verification. If the adjudicators cannot agree, the sheet is passed on to the hall’s Electoral Commission section, which will make a final decision,” he explained further.
Finally, Mr. Kirkup noted that since it is not yet clear how long the adjudication process will take, it is difficult to state how long the process for the European election votes will take.
