The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has flagged a move to electronic capture and processing of more than 150,000 enrolment forms  a month it currently receives on paper and manually processes.

In a tender just closed, the AEC called for bids on scanning and archiving of the paper forms that it must retain to comply with the Archives Act 1983. The AEC asked for the tenderers to also include a proposal for  a digital automated processing solution.

The AEC processes up to 150,000 enrolment forms per month during a non-election period but this figure increases significantly during a federal election or referendum event. 

The AEC’s tender called for an outside bureau to scan  all the paper forms after processing, send the TIFF images back via secure ftp and destroy the paper originals after three months.

However the tender documents state that “The AEC is moving toward a streamlined, modern approach to enrolment processing. Forward scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) or intelligent character recognition (ICR) may form the basis of this approach.”