Ready for your vote

Tomorrow is election day and the country will become a network of hope, change and unity.

To make sure that each of the 23.5-million votes cast will count - literally at least - there are three people and their teams who have been working tirelessly. They are Libisi Maphanga, the chief information officer for the Independent Electoral Commission, and his ICT heads Mervin Naidoo and Melanie du Plessis.

Naidoo, responsible for IT operations and Du Plessis, responsible for business systems, rattle off staggering numbers related to the setup. "There are actually 278 different elections [one for each municipality] taking place in the country tomorrow at 20859 voting stations," says Du Plessis.

Then there are 200000 staff who have to be managed, 70.5-million ballot papers to be printed, and distributed and the multimillion votes which have to be counted, captured and audited before we all hear the results.

Naidoo says: "There are 872 computers in the ROC [national Results Operation Centre in Tshwane], connectivity to [the network] is 155MB and we have 120 servers in data centres to handle the information coming through."

In 12 to 18 hours, the results will be analysed and plotted on maps per voting area. This must then be distributed to the ROC, media, social networks, the IEC website and political parties. It is a mammoth task, but the team says they are ready.

"We did the second dry run last week, and everything is in place for tomorrow. Everyone, especially the service providers, have pulled out all the stops. It is our country and people want to participate in building democracy by getting this right," says Naidoo.

Maphanga says much of the voting process is manual.

"As a technical person, I'd have loved to automate everything. But to be compliant with the acts [and the Constitution] and for the voter to be assured their secrecy is guaranteed and their vote does not change along the way, we have to use manual counterchecks. "

The tech end is world-class, however. The "impressive" geographic information system means the IEC has aerial photography of almost the entire country. These images are used to check the topography of the area and identify possible impediments to the voting stations. For example, voters should not have to climb mountains or swim through rivers to get to their voting stations.

Du Plessis said: "Once the voter arrives at the voting station, the barcoded identity document is scanned by the 'Zip-Zip machine', which confirms registration and records the demographics of people voting at that station."

The vote counting process is a manual, labour-intensive process, with several checks.

When the information becomes electronic, "it is captured and audited, per voting station and ballot paper for each party or candidate. We publish these results as they come in, on the website and internal network which political parties and the media can access at the ROC", Maphanga says.

Du Plessis says: "We mark each ward or council in the colour of the party that's won. After all these years, I am still excited by these maps because it visually tells the story of elections."