Security concerns revolving around the incoming electronic vote counting system are still present, Director of ELCOM (the PN’s electoral office) Angelito Sciberras confirmed with The Malta Independent. Both the PN and PL representatives said that work is underway to fix present issues.
Under the new system, ballot boxes will still be put into the strong room on arrival as usual, however, the votes will be scanned electronically and the voting preferences will be detected by the scanner. The ballot paper will then be displayed on a big screen at each district’s station. If the system does not recognise a ballot sheet, it is passed on to human adjudicators who – with the party delegates present – will recognise it themselves. The scanning system does not automatically reject any votes.
The Nationalist Party has already had some issues with the electronic vote counting system which it had made public following a mock test. The Partit Nazzjonalista’s trust level in the new electronic vote counting system was “seriously decreased” after changes were made to the system by the company responsible for it without informing the Electoral Commission or the political party delegates. This was stated last December.
Asked how likely it would be that electronic counting will be used in the elections Sciberras said: “everything is being done so that we will be in a position to use electronic counting. We would need to amend the law. Currently, the law mentions that counting can be done electronically, however the process is not written in the law. There is a schedule which dictates what needs to take place when manual counting Is used, so obviously there needs to be another schedule indicating each step which needs to be followed when electronic vote counting is used. We still need to see major developments since the incident we had during the last mock test, in order to have peace of mind that this method of counting will reflect the voters’ intentions.”
“Since then nothing much has changed and there haven’t been any new tests. We held a number of meetings with the electoral commission however so far we have seen nothing concrete. We still need more before we can say that as a party we are happy to have this method of e-counting carried out next May.”
Asked what the main faults are with the e-counting, he said that there is a high percentage of dubious votes being registered, but added that through the tests carried out, the reason behind it seems to have been identified. “We would need to run further tests to make sure.”
“What we are worried about is the security of the system. So far we realised that the system can be changed without the owner - being the electoral commission - being made aware, or being made automatically made aware, that changes have been made. This was the subject of the PN’s statement last December.”
He highlighted that another issue revolves around the way the system assumes sequential vote numbers. “If there is a symbol which resembles a number, but does not specifically mean that it is that number, and the actual number is missing from the sequence, there is an issue where the system would assume that the symbol represents that number.”
He also said that there is a minimum pixel size which the system does not recognise as markings on a ballot paper. “I can basically tick a dot after each number, which under law constitutes a mark and makes the vote identifiable, yet the system sees it as ok. It should, at least, send that vote to the electoral commission for adjudication, and the system should not decide on its own that it is a valid vote when it might be considered as an invalid one.” Such a situation, he said, makes a vote identifiable. “We would not know who actually voted, but we would know which ballot box that vote came from.”
Spokesperson for the Labour Party Aleander Balzan was also asked about the electronic counting system. He was asked whether agreement has been reached as to whether electronic counting will be used for sure in the upcoming elections, whether the PL has any concerns about the system which it would like fixed prior to it being used, and to provide details of said concerns, and he was asked how likely it is that this system will be used in May.
“Our party is in favour of modernizing the current system. During the mock sessions, our officials from the PL electoral office made official representations on certain issues that need improvement, and we were assured that these would be tackled by the Electoral Commission.”
“We augur that there will be a positive result so that the electronic counting will be implemented in May as planned and agreed by the Electoral Commission.”
Voting day for the MEP and local council elections in Malta will be 25 May. Sciberras told this newsroom that the counting of votes process for the MEP elections will most likely start immediately after voting closes, and that the likely dates for counting the local council election votes would be 29-31 May, from 5pm till midnight.