Could digital elections prevent WA's botched ballot?
A platform to automate vote counting for Australian federal elections using document scanning and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) could be implemented for around $A25 million and deliver results in 8 hours, according to industry experts. Its deployment could prevent situations such as the looming recall of nearly 1.5 million voters in Western Australia (WA) after a small number of ballot papers from four booths in that state went missing.
The Australian newspaper estimates that restaging the WA Senate election could cost up to $A11 million, based on the total cost of $A113 million for the 2013 federal election. The decision on whether to conduct the WA Senate vote again must be made by the Court of Disputed Returns before December 16.
The possibility of a voter recall has led many to query why we are still marking votes in pencil on paper with manual techniques for tallying and review.
Steve Ktori, Manager Digitisation Services at service bureau Acrodata said, "It makes no sense at all that we are still relying on entirely physical ballot papers. It is only a matter of time before we are actually voting at a touchscreen terminal as opposed to completing hardcopy ballot papers although there are still challenges particularly with the elderly.
"That said these days with very sophisticated digitisation equipment and software the ballot papers could be relatively simply captured electronically at the booths. Zonal OCR and OMR technology would make the digitisation process a relatively simple one although there would need to be some human verification.
"I could imagine a time when ballots papers are being digitised remotely with a central processing centre simply verifying the results on a screen. As far as the width of ballot papers goes, it’s actually not an issue because there is no limit with the sophisticated production equipment from a size perspective.
"As we transition from a hard copy to a digital world, people often throw up fears about security. The recent experience in WA highlight the fact that often the security issues are more prevalent in a physical world. It seems quite laughable that we are not embracing digital technology to mitigate risk.”
Concerns over security and voter identification means there is little momentum nationally and internationally towards Internet voting.
A report recently published by The Electoral Council of Australia and New Zealand concludes "In Australia and around the world, internet voting has only been taken up on a comparatively limited scale for public elections. This stands in stark contrast to the way in which Internet-based activities have come to dominate many other fields of endeavour, and highlights the extent to which internet voting remains a matter of dispute." The full report is online HERE
ACT Elections
In Australia only the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Electoral Commission has so far introduced scanning and ICR into the vote tallying process.
Presently all votes for the federal House of Representatives and the Senate are manually counted at more than 9000 polling places across the country.
The results were phoned through for the provisional result on September 7 after which AEC officials manually key all votes into the AEC's EasyCount computer system over subsequent days and weeks. Each ballot paper is manually entered twice by separate operators to allow each entry to be compared by the computer and any variances flagged for determination.
When results are disputed the process is to count back the physical votes once more. In the case of the knife edge result in the WA Senate, this cannot be done because 1370 ballot papers have gone missing.
If a scanning/ICR solution was employed for the initial count it would have retained an image of the missing ballots, although using these in a recount would likely require legislative change to the current Electoral Act.
The AEC has revealed the voting preferences for the missing WA votes which are consistent with the landslide swing towards the Liberal/National Coalition.
However because the actual ballot papers have gone missing, these votes cannot be included in the recount, which is likely to be challenged.
The $A25 million scanning/ICR estimate is based on centralised scanning of 28 million ballot papers (one each for the two houses of Parliament) on 300 state-of the art production scanners such as the Kodak i5800 high speed model.
A distributed solution would require scanners to be employed at over 9000 polling stations processing an average of 3000 ballot papers at each location.
Ballot form design
Francis Yanga, Australia and New Zealand Business Manager for Document Imaging at Kodak Alaris, said, "If the ballots are also optimised for data capture it will drive higher accuracy rates and reduce the added cost of validation. Generally, scanning centrally achieves higher efficiencies as highly specialised technologies and staff are used but there are challenges around transport cost and possible loss of the ballots.
"Alternatively, one-touch scanning technology is available today that makes it simple to scan ballots at each voting centre and have images sent to a centralised server for data extraction. This minimises the chance of losing physical ballots."
The Victorian Electoral Commission conducted a trial of scanning/OCR for local government elections in 2008 however a report into the trial was not enthusiastic for its widespread adoption.
The ACT's task is somewhat simplified by the fact it has only one House of Parliament and the full ballot paper is able to fit on a single A3 sheet.
For the past two ACT elections the ACT Electoral Commission has engaged business process outsourcer (BPO) The SEMA Group to provide scanning/ICR of ballots.
After the September 7 federal election the Australian Electoral Commission conducted a feasibility study on scanning below-the-line Senate ballot papers.
This study is not publicly available, however an AEC spokesperson said it found that "scanning is feasible despite obstacles that the size of federal Senate ballot papers provide (in NSW they are over a metre long).
"Undertaking scanning would need to be considered with regard to a number of factors, including the high cost of implementation and retaining equipment, and the relatively low number of below-the-line ballot papers we receive (3.88% in 2010) in comparison to overall ballots."
Below-the-line papers are where a voter chooses to sequentially number the large field of Senate candidates individually, rather than simply marking a "1" for their party of choice and leaving the order of preferences to the party.
Scanning electoral rolls
The AEC does employ a scanning solution for the electoral rolls that are marked off to record a voter's attendance at a polling booth. For the 2013 federal election, The SEMA Group established a facility in Adelaide that operated around the clock for 21 days after the September 7 election to scan 32,355 electoral lists which comprised over 14 million individual images.
These were then electronically processed to identify those who voted and those who didn't and also distinguish attempted multiple votes.
The AEC also undertook a trial of electronic certified lists at selected booths during the 2013 federal election. .
Avron Welgemoed, National Solutions Sales Manager at Iron Mountain Australia, notes that "Deploying a fleet of specialist scanners to every voting site is cost prohibitive in comparison to cardboard voting booths. Add to that the training required for staff at all those centres to be able to set up and operate those scanners and you have a logistical nightmare."
A distributed solution employing scanners at dedicated centres nationwide would still suffer the risk of ballot papers going missing in transit .
"Inconsistent ballot print quality or stray voter markings can lead to large numbers of ballot being illegible or rejected by the scanning tools. This would create similar confusion to the “hanging chads” issue that haunted the US 2000 election in Florida, forcing manual intervention and recounts," said Welgemoed.
Steven Strang, National Sales & Marketing Manager at Decipha, the BPO subsidiary of Australia Post, does not see scanning of metre-long Senate papers as a very cost-effective option
"I would have thought a booklet style that can be rendered into a format that can be run through high speed scanners would have been a faster, more accurate, and cost effective medium and solution," he said.
"Coupled with the latest OCR technology to allow automation would greatly reduce the labour component of the process while falling in to line with the government direction of digitisation. The supporting secure storage would be an electronic repository that removes the necessity of expensive transport of documents to costly long term document storage repositories."
Technology well established
Sushil Gajwani, sales manager at ACA Pacific, a specialist in providing document imaging and data capture solutions, said, “The technology has been available to capture images and information from ballot papers for many years and is advanced and reliable.
"If the ballot paper can be designed less than 300mm in width it can be processed through high speed production scanners, and the process can be automated to deliver high efficiency and accuracy.
"Scanning ballot papers and comparing the results of electronic process with the manual counting to verify the accuracy will help build the confidence to transition to an electronic counting process.”
Russell Winks, Capture Solutions Manager at BPO Converga, said "Track scanners like those we employ from Banctec and IBML are well suited to long documents and are well able to handle the meter long Senate ballot papers.
"However long documents due require more effort to align and also have a knock-on effect in terms of archival storage because they don’t fit in a standard archive box. Archival storage is important to sequentially store scanned documents in the order of the scanner generated batch number.
"When scanning many documents with very little identifying features an imprint of the batch and sequence number is critical to enable physical retrieval in the event of a poor quality scan.
"Scanning of ballot papers suit highly automated forms based capture platforms. The size of the document does present challenges for manual operator verification (completion of poor OCR data) so a solution would be required to process verifications in sections. If the forms were verified as a single document the operator default view wouldn't be large enough to facilitate ergonomic or efficient viewing.
"I don’t see the use of track scanners and the OCR results replacing the election night results because documents will need time to be couriered to scan locations say in each major city and then time is needed for scanning, OCR and verification. I see the use of scanning as the audit of the election available 2-3 days after the election."
Introducing electronic ballot boxes may improve the overall tallying process, but along with that comes the unforeseen consequence when a large hardware fleet encounters problems. Here’s a story on incorrectly configured scanners and the chaos it potentially creates.
Early hopes for a worldwide e-voting revolution have not been borne out as these reports show.