Voting data now fully computerized

Chances of another election before 2003 are slim and the Elections and Boundaries Department is taking advantage of the lull. The department has decided to step fully into the world of technology and totally computerize all its offices after years of repetitive manual data entry. This morning Prime Minister Said Musa was on hand to watch the first uplink between the central office and one of the district offices. Chief Elections Officer Myrtle Palacio says the new system will make a world of difference.

Myrtle Palacio, Chief Elections Officer

“With the kind of work we do in terms of processing data, we’re talking about over a 100,000 records, a 100,000 electors. There’s a need to make the system more efficient and to be able to give out timely information and the manual process will just not cut that. We need to really go electronic and this is what we’re doing. We have already computerized, the process started in 1997 with donations from the Organization of American States, both in hardware and software. We’re just improving on this and also extending it to the 9 district offices who up to today are still typing and using the Gestetner to process the information that comes to us.”

Janelle Chanona

“What sort of data is going to be uploaded to the central office from the district offices?”

Myrtle Palacio

“They are the transactions of mainly of electors who come in to register, new registrants as well as any changes within that month. All those transactions are going to be uploaded to us so we don’t need to keyboard those here. All we would need…we are the control here, all we would need to do is the editing and that sort of thing.”

The Elections and Boundaries Office says they hope that some time soon they will be able to include scanned photographs as part of the elector database. Each district office will be receiving a full computer system and printer.