First test of electronic ballot count

13/04/2013

The first test of the equipments for the electronic ballot count was held today in one Tirana’s high schools.

The votes of 300.000 electors are counted through scanners and the result is shown in tables that can be seen by all parties and the electoral observers.

The first test was made in presence of the Central Election Commission body, the OSCE Ambassador to Tirana, Eugen Wollfarth; the highest representative of the company that will enable it, and representatives of the political parties.

Today were improvised two counting lines of 6000 votes. The members of the electoral centre will verify the electoral materials and will manually place the ballot on one side. Every ballot is then passed to a scanner, which makes the validity verifications, reads the result and divides the contested ballots.

Due to the financial cost, the scanner that was selected today is not high end, which can make all verification process at the same time.

The biggest concern is the contested ballots. The equipment wants to replace the voting ballot within the given box, or it will be considered as contested. The equipment needs the voting mark within the given box, or it will be considered contested. For these votes it will be the members of the electoral centre to decide. But this process spurred debates and blockage by the politicians even in the test phase.

When CEC decided about the specific ballot that would be used in Fier, 42 political parties had been registered to run on June 23rd. While the deadline has not expired yet, this number has gone to 65, which will need a change of the ballot.

The Fier District, second to Tirana in size, has 10 Regional Electoral Centres, and each of them will have two scanners for the ballot counts, except one that will have three. The financial cost of this project is 1.2 million EUR, but it is unknown for how long will the ballot count be made, if there will be no blockage from the party representatives or any other problem, such as a sudden blackout.

The company that will realize the ballot count process is the Spanish “Indra”, which has realized the ballot count in England with much larger populations for each centre. However, we should keep in mind that this is not the highest end of the technology, and the will of the Albanian politicians dominates even technology. Its success will be seen only after June 23rd.