The electronic ballot-scanning pilot launched in five councils during the weekend’s local government election in Queensland has left some councillors clueless about their future. The technology that runs first-past-the-post ballot papers through a scanner, takes a photo, and then recognises the numeral, has caused extensive delays in the Noosa, Mackay, Toowoomba, Livingstone and Gladstone council regions. Less than 8 per cent of the vote has been counted in Noosa, and less than 4 per cent in Toowoomba, Gladstone and Mackay, while not a single vote has been declared for councillors in Livingstone. Electoral Commission Queensland (ECQ) assistant commissioner Dermot Tiernan said the delays in Noosa had been caused by sensitivity in the technology.
“What happened on Saturday night is that we started scanning postal votes, and postal votes are always folded up and creased, and we probably set the scanners’ sensitivity a bit too specific, so it was reading some of the creases as marks,” Mr Tiernan said. “Once we realised what was going on, we switched to pre-poll votes and the snacking technology worked quite well.”
The ECQ said the ballot-scanning technology had been developed by a two private sector companies over about six months. Mr Tiernan said while the technology had been successfully tested on Noosa ballot papers from the 2012 election, other issues on election night — when thousands of election watchers were blocked from accessing the commission’s results page — had been the result of dated software.
“The old system was built to run state elections — to run 89 elections — and on Saturday night we had to ask it to run 349 local government elections and 89 little referendum elections on top of that, so the poor thing kept tripping over itself,” Mr Tiernan said.
Full Article: Electronic ballot-scanning trial holds up council election results across Queensland – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).