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Electronic voting replaced ballots - results delivered within 10 minutes of polling stations closing
General Elections and Local County by-elections are set for change. No longer will election results be counted through the night, no longer will balloting cards be misplaced and allegations of fixed results make the headlines. Electronic voting has arrived.
In The Netherlands March election, Electronic voting booths were linked via machine-to-machine technology to the Municipality Returning Officer using Vianet’s secure, multi-network GPRS CONNECT 2 service. This employs state-of-the-art encryption, so results cannot be monitored or intercepted. In years to come results could be collated in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days.
The results for the March Netherlands election were delivered within 10 minutes of the polling stations closing.
Machine-to-machine technology has been available through various network operators for some time, but there have always been restrictions that have limited the usefulness of this technology. As with mobile phones, no single operator has a full coverage of the country, resulting in many different contracts and differently specified machines. Also, many devices were able to send information but unable receive data and process commands because they did not keep a constant address.
Vianet provides a service that not only allows companies to utilise all networks from one SIM card, and on one tariff, but also can send instructions and information to individual devices, offering massive cost savings for the operator and - where relevant - help for the end-user.
The electronic voting poll booth and the municipality returning office equipment were provided by a specialist in election facilities based in The Netherlands. This company turned to Vianet to provide the missing link which connects the polling station to the municipal centre using an enhanced form of the mobile communications technology that we all use every day. This provided the high level of security necessary for elections coupled with the ability to work on all mobile networks, ensuring that it works in every town and village, Europe-wide.