Datasouth

Technology by Datasouth delivers smooth, swift election results

Monday, 15 October 2007

A Christchurch technology company masterminded the successful administration of the recent local government elections throughout the country.

Working behind the scenes on the elections, which concluded this weekend, electionz.com counted the votes, collated the elections and delivered the results in record time.

Assisted by technology consultant Datasouth Business Solutions, electionz.com administered the postal based elections for 36 councils around New Zealand. electionz.com processed approximately 574,000 voting papers for Council and District Health Board elections from Waitakere City to Southland, which ranged from 235,000 voters in the Christchurch City Council to just 200 voting for the Chatham Islands Council.

Vote processing, for both First Past the Post (FPP) and Single Transferable Vote (STV) voting systems, was located on an indoor basketball court just north of Christchurch.

Managing director of electionz.com Steve Kilpatrick is satisfied with the way the elections were processed, and said the technology performed very well.

“130 PCs were networked to process all the votes. At the 2004 local government election there were some difficulties reading and collating preferences for the STV system for the Health Boards, but electionz.com implemented a different technology solution on that this time and worked around those issues very effectively”.

“This meant that we were able to start issuing results to our clients, shortly after voting closed at 12 noon on Saturday”.

Mike Lew of Datasouth Business Solutions said setting up the systems for the election was a challenge.

“Datasouth designed and installed the network infrastructure for the elections. There were a number of very specific requirements that precluded a standard network”.

“In total, 1.3 million voting papers were sent out and the system needed the capacity to process 1.2 million scanned images from votes returned. As the infrastructure was only temporary, for the processing of the voting papers, all equipment had to be available on short-term hire”.

“The network Datasouth developed consisted of six database servers and 130 computers for data entry. Requirements included hardware redundancy to cover system outages, data storage and backup solutions, environmental considerations such as low power consumption to conserve energy, and full security”.

“Before becoming operational, the network was tested for compliance by electionz.com’s auditors. It has gone to plan and we are satisfied that the results have been delivered promptly”.