The Electoral Commission will have to deal with a total of 579 boxes containing EU referendum ballot papers and another 215 with votes from the local council elections on March 8.
Louis Fsadni, the commission's officer in charge of vote counting, explained that in the polling stations of the 23 localities where local elections would be held, there would be separate boxes in the same room, one for the EU referendum ballots and one for those of the local council election.
The commission had designed two different ballot papers and colour coded one of the boxes to reduce the chances of having votes cast in the wrong boxes.
The ballot paper for the referendum will be much shorter than the ballot paper for local councils. The yes box will have a yellow border and the no box will have a brown border.
The back of the ballot paper for the local council elections will be green so that it may be clearly distinguished from the other one when folded.
The boxes in which the votes will be cast will be situated several metres apart so that Electoral Commission supervisors at the polling booths may be able to warn people if they see them about to deposit the ballot papers in the wrong box.
Voters in localities where council elections will be held may opt to cast both their votes at the same time or go to the polling station twice.
Chief electoral commissioner Carmel Degabriele said the Referendum Act made it clear that voters should show their preference by marking X or any other clear sign in the box of their choice.
The vote would not be valid if more than one mark were made on the ballot paper, if the voter's choice were not clear, if a mark that could identify the voter were made or if the ballot paper did not have the commission's official stamp on the back.
Mr Fsadni said that since the votes of the referendum would be counted first, the boxes containing the local council ballots would be kept sealed in a separate area.
The Electoral Commission hopes that the counting of the referendum ballots would be faster than in an election since there will be nine more counting agents than for a general election and the sorting of votes should be simpler.
Yes and no votes will be placed in their respective racks while all other votes will be placed in racks marked "dubious". Mr Fsadni said that the commission had prepared itself for all eventualities and expected there would be many dubious votes "for obvious reasons". The commission and party representatives would then decide whether these were valid or not.
Once sorting is over, the counting of the yes votes would start first. The no votes would then be counted.
When ballot boxes arrive at the counting hall, a conciliation process will take place to ensure that the number of votes cast tallies with the ballots handed out at each booth. If it is found that a referendum box contains fewer ballots, the box containing the votes for the local council election will be opened to transfer any referendum ballots which may have been cast there by mistake.
The local council box would then be resealed.
Mr Fsadni said the commission would be launching a media campaign to inform the people how to mark the ballot papers.
He said the referendum ballot papers should ideally only be folded once before being cast as this would help speed up the sorting process.
The votes would be counted on 23 tables and all of Malta and Gozo would be considered as a single district. The commission has already published in the Government Gazette the numbers of the ballot boxes and in which localities these will be. The respective tables within the counting hall have also been identified.
When counting on a table is completed, the results for that table will be published by the commission immediately and the final result of all tables will be published when all counting is done.
The counting of local council election votes will start on Monday, March 10 at 8 a.m.
Mr Fsadni said the political parties had been briefed about the procedures that would be followed to expedite matters as much as possible.