'As printed in The GreenSheet'
The case study was printed in the December 2003 issue of The GreenSheet.
(www.green-sheet.net )
Democracy in Action – How Australia’sVictoria
StateUses OMR to Get Voters to the Polling Booth
Democracy works on a
simple premise – one man, one vote, and works best when each citizen exercises
his/her right to vote. But getting
people to vote is difficult as witnessed by the low voter turnout for such
important elections as the 2000 US Presidential election, where 49% voted. Australia is one of eight countries in the
world who have addressed this problem by making voting not a right or a
privilege, but a compulsory obligation.
Compulsory voting was introduced at the Australian federal level in
1924, and the State of Victoria introduced it for their lower house elections
in 1926, and for the upper house in 1935.
Victoria uses a system of
preferential voting in its elections.
Voters must mark their ballots with an order of preference for each
candidate and the candidate who gains 50% plus 1 of the votes is elected (if no
candidate achieves over 50% of the first preference votes, the preferences are
distributed until one candidate gains an absolute majority). Although each enrolled (everyone over the
age of 18 who is an Australian citizen with a Victorian address has to enroll) citizen
has to vote, they do have the option of casting an ‘informal vote’ ie one that
does not conform to the rules for preferential voting by, for example, having
no marks against a candidate’s name, or marking each candidate a ‘0’. At the last election, 3.4% of votes cast
were ‘informal’.
Compulsory voting ensures
a large turnout for elections – 93.2 % at Victoria’s 2002 State election. However, as enrolled voters who fail to vote
are subject to a fine of AS$50, it puts a greater emphasis on the accurate
marking of the electoral rolls for voter participation.
There are approximately
3.2 million voters on the Victorian State electoral roll. Prior to an election the Victorian Electoral
Commission (VEC) prints out and delivers to each of the 1,600 voting centers,
the ‘scannable roll’. The roll has the
names and addresses of each voter entitled to vote within the designated
district. The roll is printed
double-sided, with two columns per page, each column with a maximum of 100
names, giving a maximum of 200 names and addresses per side, 400 per
sheet. There is one roll, containing
approximately 90 pages and 37,000 voters, for each of the 88 districts in the
State; but each district is supplied with multiple copies of the roll to be
used in the separate voting centers.
There are a total of 6,500 rolls used in the whole State, which means
about 600,000 A-4 printed pages.
Beside each name on the
roll page are two clock marks, and the voting center officials are expected to
place a straight mark between these to indicate that the individual has
voted. The officials are requested to
use a sharpened pencil and a small ruler to draw the line.
The VEC has been scanning
the rolls for a number of years, using a roll scanning solution specific to
this task. The software was old MS-DOS
based and the development company had halted support. Additionally, the roll scanning machines were old, slow,
unreliable and could only be used to process the scannable rolls. It came time to replace the machines and the
VEC decided that it would be more cost effective to replace them with equipment
that could be used for a number of other scanning requirements within the VEC,
in addition to the scanning of the rolls.
After putting the
requirements out to tender, the VEC selected a solution using Inotec’s SCAMAX
scanners, SCE’s TwinScan software (SCE is an integrator of Dunord’s TwinStream
technology), and Dunord’s OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) software for the
scannable rolls.
The new equipment helped
the VEC resolve a time-crunch problem that arose with the last State election
held in November 2002. The VEC wanted
to issue the ‘Failure to Vote’ notices prior to a major round of municipal
council elections conducted in March 2003, to avoid voter confusion with
correspondence from the VEC regarding a State election and council elections.
To meet this requirement, all scanning of the rolls had to be completed in 5
weeks over the December 2002-January 2003 time period. Under the old system, the scanning process
would have taken months.
The scanning of the marks
is part of a larger process for the checking and accounting of the marks
against the ballots issued, to ensure a true and fair election. It also identifies, by the lack of marks,
those to whom a ‘Failure to Vote’ notice must be mailed.
Using 4 SCAMAX scanners,
operating approximately 10 hours per day, and the TwinStream software, the
approximately 600,000 pages were scanned in 2.5 weeks. The scanned pages were
parsed by Dunord’s OMR software to determine the marks on each page, providing
a file of the page number and position of the mark, which was cross-referenced
to the master database to determine the actual voter. Approximately 2.4 million
marks were captured from about 200,000,000 possible positions. Some voters forwarded mail-in ballots which,
of course, were not recorded via the scannable rolls at the poll booths.
Although clear
instructions are given as to how the marks are to be made, these were not
always followed. Pencils quickly become
blunted, rulers are misplaced, so not all the marks are exactly between the
clock marks, some lines are wavy or incomplete. There is movement of the data on the printed page, caused by the
pages being printed on different laser printers and scanned by different
scanners. Printers and scanners are not
“ideally” linear in respect to one another which can cause problems for high
speed OMR reading. Another problem was that the markable areas are extremely
close to one another because of the density of names and addresses per page,
and the documents are black print on white paper so there is no ability to
drop-out colors to make the required items more legible.
Simon Hancock, VEC’s IT
Manager, said, “ Dunord resolved all the issues almost immediately and provided
some of the best technical support I have seen from an IT supplier. Sometimes
the marks found on the scannable roll didn’t match the number of ballot papers
issued. This required a check of the marks found by the Dunord OMR software
against the actual roll. In almost
every situation this resulted in the scanning solution being more accurate than
the audit process used.”
The VEC did the OMR’ing in
concert with the scanning, and the whole operation was completed in under three
weeks over a hectic time (December/January is mid-summer ‘down-under’ and a
major holiday period). They were able
to mail approximately 150,000 ‘Failure to Vote’ notices well in advance of the
March council elections, giving Victoria’s non-voters ample time to respond
with a valid (as defined by legislation) excuse or pay the fine – and time to
consider how to handle their democratic responsibilities for the March council
elections.