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DRS delivers complex Scottish Community Council election in record time
The Argyll and Bute Community Council elections which took place on Thursday 7th April were counted electronically using DRS e-Counting technology in record time - the first Scottish Council to ever deliver an election via an e-Count using this particular technology from data capture specialists DRS. Argyll and Bute Council delivered its all postal council election results within 1½ hours, a process that would have taken 7 - 8 hours if counted manually.
With 19 contested elections involving 109 candidates, standing for 75 seats for Community Councils, and taking into account the breadth of this sparsely populated council area, the process of printing, dispatching and counting 19 different types of multi-seat ballot papers was going to be a complex task. Coupled with the fact that the Council covers the second largest geographical area of any Scottish local authority, with 26 inhabited islands and over 3,000 miles of coastline - more than the entire coastline of France, Argyll and Bute Council decided that the only efficient and effective way to overcome large distances and isolation was to have an all postal election that was counted electronically.
Argyll and Bute Council looked to DRS for support as it had a proven and well documented track record of managing a range of complex election counts all over the world. DRS was not only tasked with the provision and management of technology for the e-Count, but it was also brought on board to design and print all 12,000 ballot papers of 20 different types and dispatching them out to the electorate using the electoral register data. The Council and DRS adopted a partnership approach that brought them together, working as part of an overall team to deliver the election process.
Argyll and Bute Returning Officer Nigel Stewart said, ‘My staff have been delighted and impressed by the professionalism, knowledge and commitment of the DRS team who delivered all of the printed materials for the election, and then provided the hardware and software necessary to undertake the electronic count at the Council’s headquarters at Lochgilphead. The technology is sophisticated which makes the process very straightforward’.
‘As the first Scottish Council to deliver an election using this particular e-Count technology, Argyll and Bute are leading the way in modernising the electoral process in Scotland,’ commented Sonya Anderson, election business manager, DRS. ‘With complex elections such as the introduction of Single Transferable Voting in Scottish Local Government elections in 2007, we hope that other Scottish Councils will follow Argyll and Bute’s example and embrace this method of counting. It really is the only way to deliver complex STV elections and will ensure Returning Officers are able to deliver results quickly, securely and accurately.’
The DRS PhotoScribe® scanner provides unique Imaging and Optical Mark Recognition capabilities and is ideally suited to e-Counting complex elections. It uses the latest contact head technology to electronically count and image ballot papers at a rate of 2 per second. The scanner head itself is capable of detecting double feeds and is designed to scan ballot papers in the correct orientation regardless of which way they are stacked into the input hopper.
Security of the count was paramount and the e-Counting software developed by DRS carried out multiple security checks on every single ballot paper during the scanning process preventing fraudulent papers from being entered into the count. Images were taken of any ballot paper where there was any doubt of the voters’ intent which were then automatically sent to a workstation operated by election officials for adjudication. Any ballot paper that was not recognised as an official ballot was outsourced by the scanner for manual intervention by election staff.