Contender basks in STV count aftermath

By PAUL BRISLEN

While Government agencies are investigating Datamail's failure to deliver its local body election results on time, a locally developed competitor is being lauded for its capabilities.

New Zealand Post subsidiary Datamail has not produced election results for a number of councils and district health boards days after they were due to be released.

David Allen, general manager of Datamail's document solutions group, said the company was working through its issues and that a project manager had been appointed by New Zealand Post.

"[John Henderson]'s working through the formalities with the various parties who are now all over the project, which include Ministry of Health, Internal Affairs and the Audit Office."

The Government is considering a ministerial inquiry into the delays.

However Moore Gallagher, one of the country's largest providers of print, billing and direct marketing services, has produced a software voting product called Votext which has been successfully used by dozens of councils.

The company wasn't willing to discuss its successes until after competitor Datamail had delivered the final vote counts.

Independent Electoral Services, the company that ran the local elections for several councils, made use of Votext and had little problem with it, said IES owner Dale Ofsoske.

"It's been very successful from our point of view."

Ofsoske has run elections for the Auckland region for nearly 20 years and set up IES with his wife Judith in 1996. This year sees the most widespread use of the single transferable vote system, which requires citizens to choose candidates in order of preference.

Ofsoske said his company used a combination of optical character recognition for the "first past the post" parts of the voting form and a more advanced software for the STV.

"The optical mark recognition software has been around for a long time. It just looks for a mark on the page and registers that."

For STV, however, the software must be able to distinguish between handwritten numbers.

"We're using intelligent character recognition for the STV," he said.

The software scans each ballot paper and registers the voting order each citizen has chosen. To successfully process handwriting instead of simple ticks or crosses requires a different level of software sophistication, Ofsoske said.

He tested the Votext software in a full-scale "dress rehearsal" last year.

"In November we had 35,000 voting papers printed and tested the system on those.

"The November testing showed we had trouble with the number '4' for example. Everybody seems to write the number differently."

Ofsoske said real humans were still included in the process and weren't about to be made redundant.

For example, Taranaki District Council staff entered the data from each voting paper using a bar code scanner. "Where you've got preferences the software can read that in the order it's swiped. And you do it twice, of course, as a check and then do a reconciliation afterwards."

Datamail would not comment on the technology it used to process its results until the various reviews were complete.