In the upcoming local government elections, an innovative digital ballot registration system will be applied for the first time. This innovation will make the tallying of voting results as transparent, fast and, importantly, protected from the human factor as possible.
The new digital method was presented for widespread use during the March 8 vote. The main task of the ambitious project was to significantly speed up the processing of a huge array of data. This was reported during a joint press conference by the head of the KVR and chairwoman of the election commission Hanna Sammüller, as well as the head of the IT Department Laura Dornheim. According to them, the automation of control will become a guarantee of trust in the results.
Principles of the registration system at polling stations
It is important to emphasize that the implemented technology is not a system of fully automatic reading of votes where a machine makes decisions itself. The human factor will remain a key element of democracy: volunteers and commission members will still independently enter data on the votes cast into work laptops. However, the algorithm of actions itself will become much more structured and protected from accidental failures or inattentiveness.
Special software will take over the most painstaking part of the work — the function of instant primary verification of each ballot for its validity. In addition, the digital platform will assign a unique serial number to each form, which will allow any inaccuracies in the database to be detected and corrected in the shortest possible time. Thanks to this, it will be enough for commission staff to pick up a document only once, enter the data, and conduct a final check without returning to the same stacks of paper several times.
Optimization of the vote counting process in Munich
In past years, the procedure for tallying results took significantly more time and required the performance of many intermediate, sometimes redundant actions. Commission members removed ballots from urns, sorted them into groups for a long time, manually recorded each vote in paper registers, and only after that transferred the figures to a general electronic system. The new methodology will completely exclude this paper stage — all information will be recorded directly in the computer and instantly transmitted to the KVR.
To objectively assess how effectively the technology works, a large-scale comparative experiment will be organized this year. In the 19th city district (Thalkirchen – Obersendling – Forstenried – Fürstenried – Solln), the counting of votes cast by mail will be divided into two parts. One half will be processed in the classic manual way, and the second — using the digital tool. The local government elections will take place on March 8.Source: dpa
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