The Electoral Commission has taken the plunge and issued a tender for an electronic vote counting system for use in all elections from 2019 onward.
The advent of electronic voting will substantially trim down the time it takes to count votes, particularly given Malta’s laborious Single Transferable Voting system, which takes days on end to produce the full results of electoral polling. The new system is expected to produce election results in a matter of a few hours.
In its tender announcement issued this week, the Electoral Commission has made it clear that the system will certainly not be employed in the next general election, whether that is to be held this year or next, and specifies that it will be first used for tallying the results of the 2019 European Parliament and Local Council Elections.
It does, however, also specify that the system will be used in subsequent general elections, European Parliament, Local Council Elections and any casual election between 2019 and 2024.
The prospect of electronic voting, which would require a culture change for the electorate rather than the Electoral Commission, appears to be off the cards for the time being, as the tender document clearly specifies that: “Tenderers shall deliver a complete solution for the required infrastructure and services. The end-to-end solution includes the process from receipt of ballot boxes to the result being calculated and made available to the Electoral Commission for publication. This will require a broad range of technologies and capabilities.”
Political parties had agreed last year to introduce electronic vote counting and the Electoral Commission had suggested that the technology would be introduced for the 2019 dual election. And with this week’s announcement of the tender, the implementation of such a system has been confirmed. The system is expected to cost in the region of €3 to €4 million.
The Electoral Commission had first announced its intention to go for electronic vote counting in June 2015 when it issued a Request for Information to conduct market research for the initiative.
The next general election will be the last to witness the all too familiar scenes of political party representatives crowding the counting hall in their hordes, keeping a keen eye on the vote counting process. And, of course, banging furiously on the Perspex when they see a ballot sheet being placed in the wrong pile or when they consider a vote to have been dubiously marked on the ballot sheet.
It will, as the adage goes, be the end of an era.