IEC Case Study

Large enough to cover the roof of a small car, it consists of six sheets of paper with the names and photographs of an astonishing 882 election candidates.

This is the sight that confronted four million voters in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Sunday, 31 July 2006. Printed in South Africa as part of the South African government's contribution to peace and democracy in the DRC, that country's ballot papers weighed in at 2,000 tons—about seven times more than the average 300 tons used in South African elections. One can only imagine the size of the ballot boxes used.

"Of course there's no way you can begin to compare South African elections to the DRC or even the United States for that matter," says Du Plessis, deputy chief executive officer of the IEC. "Compared to many other countries, South Africa has massive advantages when it comes to arranging elections."
 
One is the bar-coded identity document system. Without it, voter registration would have to be done manually, meaning it could take up to six months just to compile the voters' roll. Instead, thanks to bar-coded IDs, the IEC can put the voters' roll together in one or two days.
 
Whoever created the bar-coded ID system certainly deserves credit but so does the IEC for devising the 'zip-zip'—the handy bar-code scanner that automatically captures each voter's ID number during voter registration.

'Okay, we'll zip-zip'

Du Plessis remembers the day the 'zip-zip' was conceived. "We were sitting at Accenture's offices, having a meeting about the 1999 national elections and someone kept saying, 'But Norman, what about voter registration?' They were forcing me to say in 10 seconds flat how we were going to register 22 million voters, so I said, 'Okay, we'll 'zip-zip'."
 
In fact, every one of the innovations that earned the IEC a Smithsonian Institute award for the effective use of technology in the 1999 elections was its own brainchild. "In terms of concept, the totality of our systems and processes has come from within the IEC itself," says Du Plessis. "We had very clear requirements for the election and knew exactly what we wanted; what we needed was someone to make it happen."
 
In many cases, that someone has been Accenture, which has partnered with the IEC since its inception in November 1997.
 
They spent the first six months establishing a skeleton staff, defining and implementing operational policies, systems and processes for human resources, finance and procurement. Only then could the IEC begin the real work of preparing for the election and, with only a year to go before the event, time was of the essence.
 
Hence, the IEC decided to make technology the backbone of its preparations. Among others, it used a unique geographical information system to produce the first-ever electronic map of South Africa, for the purposes of voting district delimitation, rolled out a satellite-based wide area network linking 526 electoral offices, developed computer programmes to link the 'zip-zips' to a central database, created a call centre capable of handling over 27,000 calls a day and used short message service (SMS) and automatic teller machines to communicate with voters.

Proving the critics wrong
All of this was completed in less than 18 months, a formidable achievement that startled many observers. "Predictions by international commentators at the start of the project were dire indeed, with many skeptics declaring that it would never be finished in the allotted time frame, said the Network Times. Well, they were wrong."
Indeed they were. The 1999 election results were delivered in just five days, well within the seven-day limit set by law, and were universally declared free and fair—precisely what the IEC had hoped to achieve.
 
"In 1994, the vote counting was centralised and there was no public participation until the end when the results were announced," says Du Plessis. "Since 1999, the counting has been done at each and every voting station—all 19,000 of them. People and political parties are present the whole day, from the time the ballot boxes are opened to the time they are sealed, the votes counted and the results for that station announced, so there can't be any fiddling. The surprise element of 1994 has given way to full participation."
 
Another improvement since 1994 is the dramatically shorter queues at voting stations. "In the first elections, some voters queued for up to three days," he says. "This has come down to about half an hour. In the case of voter registration, no one should stand in a queue for longer than 10 minutes."
 
Taxpayers too, would be pleased with the IEC's track record in managing down the costs of South Africa's elections. "Every year since 1999, the election cost per voter in South Africa has decreased, as has our budget," he says. "Despite inflation, every election costs less than the last one."
 
While technology has been a key success factor in South Africa's elections, national and local, since 1999, the IEC has never used technology purely for technology's sake, says Du Plessis.
 
"In the election business, you have to know when to go hi-tech and when to tone it down. One can easily become obsessed with technology, but that can be counterproductive," he says. "Good technology is appropriate technology; it meets needs, it exceeds expectations, it makes a difference."
 
He cites Accenture's appreciation of appropriate versus inappropriate technology as one of the reasons why the relationship has worked for more than seven years. "We generate the concepts, they handle the practical side and make it work, and they have never tried to force us to use technology for the sake of it. They understand that every application and every technological decision has to ensure the delivery of the elections or contribute to the sustainable organisation of the future."