For greater transparency, and to allow people to have access to interim results from all polling stations, results on polling night can be posted on a wall/chalkboard/spreadsheet at each local office of the electoral management body (EMB). This also allows journalists and media to see the interim results as they come in, if no periodic report is available to be provided to them.
On polling night, interim results should be counted for each candidate/party/option for each polling station. The local office of the EMB will compile these results and create a summary report per candidate/political party/option to send to the national EMB. They will then count the total electoral district results per political party/candidate/option and indicate these to be the final interim result when forwarding the summary to the national office of the EMB.
After the final count, the national office will receive the official poll-by-poll final results and compile them into a national publication.
In all cases, a double counting procedure should be used, even if it is computerized, before the results are publicly posted. After each five to ten polling stations, a comparison should be made between the two persons responsible for the counts. If results no longer match, the previous few additional figures can easily be verified and corrected.
If a computerized system is used, two people should enter the same data at separate computer workstations. The computer systems can be programmed to immediately point out when and where entries do not match exactly for a specific polling station. This makes the process of verification much simpler.
