REALSOFT Advanced Applications offered its software applications development expertise to the Jordanian government to carry out the electoral process in the years 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. The electoral system that was developed for the Jordanian parliament elections has evolved during the years to become a modern enterprise electronic nationwide system. In fact, the process went through several rounds of development to achieve versatility, maintainability, high availability, scalability and security.
The elections system covered the entire election phases, starting from the preparatory stages (pre-elections/pre-experiments), through the voting and votes counting systems designed specifically for the elections day, and ending with statistical reports on the post-election stage and extracting and disseminating results and reports.
Despite the fact that nationwide network connectivity can be challenging, however, the benefits of such connectivity far exceeds connectivity challenges. Voter’s eligibility can be checked online, voter identity and picture can be displayed online, all statistical information like turnout can be published on dashboard for observers and media center online; monitoring of the voting progress in voting stations in addition to counting progress can also be followed moment by moment through maps to understand the geographic implication of the process also online. Needless to say, online connectivity of the system allows for system management tasks to be executed centrally. Connectivity through GSM 3G/4G/ ADSL have been deployed and tested successfully. SMS technology was also incorporated to allow for system connectivity is case all other options become invalid.
System Functional Areas
Pre Elections
Main Functions:
1
Polling stations locations management
2
Voter’s administration and voters’ lists
3
Candidate administration
4
Committee’s administration
5
Elections simulation and testing
This part of the system allows for the registration of candidates wishing to run for parliament seat based on a hierarchy of electoral districts based on geographic location/Religion and/or ethnic groups minorities (i.e. Circassians) in addition to female quota if it exists. In our part of the world, there is a preset number of seats reserved to represent minorities and female population.
Once the electoral constituencies are defined, all polling centers and polling stations within centers are defined with user privileges per polling station.
Citizens who are eligible (voters list) for voting are fed into the system. Depending on current laws, sometimes a pre-registration is required in which case, the citizens can be given registration card with information about where they can cast their votes (Polling centers). Those who don’t register are not allowed to cast their votes on elections day. The system can handle allowing the citizen to vote from any polling center he/she wishes to attend to, or assign voters to specific voting centers.
Elections Day
Main Functions:
1
Online Voters eligibility check.
2
Online turnout statistics publications.
3
Monitoring of polling stations progress and connectivity.
This is a critical part of the solution. This is when all polling stations PC are connected to the main servers in the Data centers belonging to the Independent Electoral Commission. All committee users are authenticated and are online expecting voters to visit polling stations. During the day, the committee members will check on the identity and eligibility of the voter via a light weight web based centralized application. The system will display a picture of the voter, basic civil information, and voting status as not to allow duplicate votes. Voters will not vote electronically via this system, but need to fill a certified form and drop it in a box. Should there be power or network interruption, the user can use a mobile phone in order to verify the voter status. An SMS message is sent and the application replies accordingly. The system even allows for changing the status of the voters via SMS.
System Services
The Electoral system offers a variety of services to enhance the whole process and add value to the solution and the elections process, the services provided are as follows:
Process Evaluation & Quality
Considering the importance of process quality, the company provided a special system for the voting process and has linked it with the central database which lead to linking all voting and ballots stations all over the kingdom, in order to prevent voters from voting in more than one voting station by assigning their national IDs to voting stations. The system doesn’t allow second editing for the information entered, which prevents errors, knowing that every ballots box is linked with the center through (3) back-up services that enable a ballots box committee to audit the eligibility of the voter even during electricity blackouts.
The electoral system is equipped with a data encryption feature to prevent even the system administrator to access the data and deal with it, since only the data entry user can handle the data through special screens.
Business Intelligence
RealSoft’s integrated solution for elections is featured to instantly and smartly display numbers and statistics through graphs of statistical significance related to the elections process, online, through dashboards in the Business Intelligence (BI) system. The system displays ratios and number of voters on several levels (kingdom, province, department), in addition to displaying primary and final results, votes counting status, and winners result. Moreover, the electoral system inside voting stations displays the number of voters updated moment by moment, where the data is available to authorized personnel around the clock. A functionality that gives the researchers, decision-makers, and other interested parties information that are easy to read and understand and derive information from.
GIS Component
The company deployed the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) techniques; which allows the user to follow up with the polling station readiness before the voting process begins by displaying every voting center on the map by a certain colored pointer to represent whether or not the center is successfully connected to the systems, making it easier for managers and employees to identify areas that require follow-up, visually. In the same manner, the system allows users to follow up with the votes counting process by displaying count completion percentage and other related figures for each voting center, by a colored pointer on the map, with the ability to display such information at the level of ballot boxes. The system displays this information in the form of colored points on the map so that each point represents a center and each color represents a completion status. Moreover, the system provides the former properties on several levels (provinces, constituencies, polling and counting centers, and the entire Kingdom).
Projects
- Jordanian Elections (2007, 2010,2013.2016)
