In the year 2015, the Electoral Commission has commissioned a study on an electronic vote counting solution.

Most countries have had systems such as this, including exit polls, for the last 15-20 years. For years on end, this newspaper, and many other news mediums, have harped on about the need for such as system to be introduced.

The system in Malta is entirely manual, and the counting day is usually characterised by stress, tension in the counting hall and a race to see which party officials can count sample votes the quickest in order to forecast a winner. The way the system works, however, means that official results are issued some three days after counting begins.

It puts the country under undue stress and continues to be one of the major issues that makes us so bizarrely heavily reliant on our political system and our political class. The system in itself should not be that hard to conceive. After all, there are many such systems which are in use around the world. Introducing a system with exit polls would allow us to know the winner of elections on the same day our votes are cast.

The costs of elections are great – both in tangible and in intangible terms as everyone goes into slowdown. When this is coupled with the fact that we have to pay people to manually count the votes, then we can begin to understand that the current system is cumbersome, outdated and not in sync with modern norms in a mature democracy.

While it is at it, the Electoral Commission should also study the feasibility of voting by proxy, in terms of Maltese people who live abroad being allowed to vote. Surely, there is a better system which could be employed, rather than having people actually have to get on a plane and come to Malta to cast their vote. It could be done through the post, at embassies or even through secure electronic mail.

Another issue which should be looked at is our Day of Reflection law. We are not the only country in the world to retain it, the UK does too, but maybe it is about time that the restrictions on this are lifted too. In the age of social media, it simply does not make sense. This is not the 1980s dominated by print. This is an era where anyone can say anything they want on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and many others. We always coin the term, but the law is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

The move to study electronic vote counting is very positive, but it should not just be a whimsical look into the possibility. It must be a concerted effort to come up with an alternative system to the manual one that is in place today. The study should also be expanded to look at other facets of our voting procedure which could be improved and updated to suit the modern reality that we live in today.