The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will spend four times as much on technology for the 2009 general elections than it has on previous elections.
The total ICT budget for the upcoming 2009 general election is about R200 million, compared to an average of R50 million for previous elections.
According to advocate Pansy Tlakula, chief electoral officer at the IEC, a lot of this spend is due to voter registration scanners that have to be replaced.
"The current stock of scanners was acquired in 1998," explains Tlakula. The IEC now has to buy 30 000 new scanner units.
Tlakula says technology spend is not limited to hardware, as ICT plays a critical role in the preparations for, and the running of, the elections.
"Most of our electoral systems are IT-based," says Tlakula, quoting examples such as voter registration, candidate nominations, the appointment of electoral staff, the identification of voting stations, and the capturing of election results.
"The scale of our operations and the level of efficiency and accuracy required in election management make the use of IT imperative."
As technology partners, the IEC uses a panel of ICT companies, consisting of Afrigis, Data World, Computec, Open Spatial Solutions, Intergraph Systems, Accenture, Time Quantum and arivia.kom.
During the 2006 municipal elections, the IEC ran nearly 19 000 voting stations - this is set to increase to 20 000 in 2009. Since the previous election, the electoral body has embarked on training of more than 37 000 presiding and deputy presiding officers to be used in future elections.
SA has 20.6 million registered voters and this is estimated to reach 22 million by the time the next general election comes around.
Getting tech-savvy
Tlakula says most political parties are becoming more open to the use of technology with every election and some are even lobbying for the use of electronic voting. However, SA, according to Tlakula, is not yet ready to offer such facilities.
"Firstly, the cost of electronic voting is high," she explains. "There are other challenges associated with electronic voting which even so-called developed democracies, like the US, are still grappling with."
She quotes the absence of a paper trail in the voting and verification system as some of these challenges, as well as suspicions associated with the use of technology in counting votes.
"We will not be using online voting in 2009, not even for the 2011 local government elections. We will, however, get there one day."
Tlakula says the IEC is "quite advanced" in its preparations for the 2009 presidential election.
"It takes about two years to prepare for an election," she says. "We are busy finalising the enhancements of our electoral systems to improve, among others, efficiency and transparency of our processes."
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