Malta does not have an e-voting system. Voters have to go on foot to the polling booth, and with pencil and paper indicate their preferences. Then all ballots are taking to the counting hall and within a few hours of the closure of the voting we know who has been entrusted to govern the country.
On voting day, all the polling stations in Malta and Gozo were connected by 238 lines to different entities
As old-fashioned as this may sound, there is a lot of technology behind it all and the Naxxar counting hall on Sunday, March 10, once again proved how dependent we are on digital communication for a smooth running of the paper-based electoral process.
Go has revealed some very interesting data on the use of technology at the Naxxar counting hall. The numbers speak for themselves.
Between 11am and noon, when the sorting of votes according to the No 1 preferences on ballots started in earnest and the unofficial result that Labour had won was made public, Go recorded more than 60,000 mobile calls and around 93,000 SMS. And this is just one operator.
Factor in the other two mobile operators and the numbers could easily more than double.
Yet it was not just mobile communication.
At the Naxxar counting hall Go installed 425 fixed telephony lines which were used by the Electoral Commission, the police, the political parties, the media and others working from there. There were 50 ADSL internet broadband lines, 45 of which were inside the counting hall and five were at the disposal of the Electoral Commission, the media, and the political parties in points outside Naxxar.
The police had a CCTV system that used a 200Mbps fibre very fast broadband connection to connect the cameras in Naxxar, the police general headquarters in Floriana and other strategic sites. On Saturday, March 9, voting day, all the polling stations in Malta and Gozo were connected by 238 lines to different entities including the police, the AFM, the Civil Protection Department, the political parties, hospitals, and the Electoral Commission’s offices in Valletta.