Saturday, April 27, 2019

How to speed up the results for general elections

Malaysia is a large country with 31 million people and covering a large geographical area.

They were able to declare their general election 2018 results within one day. There was some delay due to the suspicious conduct of the election commission, but still the results were announced quite early.

Indonesia is a large country with 264 million people, nearly 7 times of Malaysia. It has a larger geographical area than Malaysia, but this should not be result in a long delay. The election commission will only declare the results in 35 days.

I read that the results are counted at each polling station but they are sent to different layers for manual tabulation. I wonder why they do not use the Internet to speed up this process.

This is how it can be done.

a) Each polling station enter the results into the database and prints out a copy locally to be signed by the local officials and witnesses. The signed copy is also uploaded into the database. This should be completed within a few hours of close of voting.

b) To prevent hacking of the database, the results are stored in a second database which is under the control of an independent authority. Different encryption keys can be applied to the data in both databases.

c) The results for both databases are compared and differences are highlight. It will be difficult for the hacker to alter the results in two database with the same fraudulent data. The differences can be checked against the signed, scanned copy.

Using this approach, it should be possible for the election commission to publish the interim results (excluding the votes at polling stations that are under dispute) within a few days.

Tan Kin Lian

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