The most recent American Presidential election has put the spotlight on not only the American electoral system and how their elections are administrated, but also election automation. Due the debacle in Florida, politicians all over the world are now aware of the fact that election administration procedures and techniques need an overhaul. Suddenly they realized that just because no one had complained too loudly over the years, the work of the EMB could no longer be ignored. Maybe also the election administration could benefit from the latest development in the field of technology and IT.
Advances in computer and telecommunications technology provide many
opportunities to
automate various aspects of the electoral process. Today's technology
makes it possible not only
to add computers to the electoral process, but also to conduct elections
via telephone and the
Internet. But it is important for election administrators to consider
which technologies will be
most valuable in each electoral situation before spending a lot of money
on technology that does
not address their needs and may soon be obsolete. Automation requires
not only expert
knowledge of the election processes but also expert advice on
technology.
Computers may be useful for
- election planning, managing, budgeting, and record keeping
- drawing precinct boundaries
- verifying and counting signatures on petitions
- providing information to candidates, parties, and voters
- monitoring and disclosing campaign contributions and spending
- registering voters
- authenticating voters at polling sites
- managing absentee voting
- recording votes, counting ballots, and transmitting local tallies
to central tallying
facilities
- disseminating election results31
Many of these tasks can be automated using off-the-shelf computer
hardware and software.
However, some of these tasks, especially those that occur on election
day, may require
specialised hardware or software that should undergo extensive testing
prior to use in an
election.
In the established democracies, elections are recurring events that usually do not result in very strong emotions among the population. Electoral disputes are dealt with in accordance to procedures guided by the legal framework, even when the political system faces new and unanticipated events. However, in many emerging democracies, election administrative procedures used by the EMBs are so fresh that their capacity to handle unforeseen events is limited. Nor does it exist a general trust in governmental activities among the electorate, and therefore administrative difficulties due to technical failures on election day can have dire consequences, not only financially but in human lives too.
A word of caution is not only directed at managers of EMBs in emerging democracies. The Norwegian election authorities tried to tally the votes in a general election solely using computers, but the system could not handle the magnitude of data and crashed delaying the compilation of the results considerable. The costs of these elections were also higher than normal because of the investments in hardware and the necessity to call in extra staff to solve the technical problems on election day, as well as additional technical and manual control mechanisms had to be developed to ensure the trustworthiness of the results.
In this topic area, we will focus mostly on the use of computers to
record votes directly and to
count machine-readable ballots. We will examine the Election Automation -- Motivations for
election automation, describe
the different kinds of Election Automation -- Types of computerized voting systems, and discuss Needs Analysis, the Implementation of
computerised voting, and
issues related to Safeguards and Security. Considerations for automating many of the
other tasks are discussed
in the section on Other Uses of Technology as well as in other sections of this
encyclopedia. Finally, we will
discuss 'emf04' of election automation.
