Last Sunday night’s vote counting process in the MEP elections was not the swift affair many were expecting for the introduction of Malta’s new electronic counting system.
Although many were expecting the entire process to be over in just a few hours, the final result came well after midnight.
Political party electoral insiders told the Times of Malta that one of the main reasons the process took so long was that throughout the counting process, electoral officials faced problems of vote reconciliation.
“In a number of instances, we faced scenarios where a ballot box that was meant to contain 500 votes, actually contained 499, or say 501,” a source said.
In some cases this was because of a minor error committed by the Electoral Commission officials. However, in several other instances, they discovered that voters had placed their completed ballot for the MEP election in the ballot box meant for the local council election.
“We had to open around 150 or 200 boxes from the local council elections to find missing votes. This process takes quite some time, and needs to be done rigorously,” the source said, pointing out that it would have been a better idea had the two ballots been a different distinct colour rather than shades of white.
Counting of votes for the local election will begin tomorrow.
Meanwhile, another party electoral source said the scanning machines introduced for this election presented a few “teething” issues when it came to identifying dubious votes.
“This was a bit of a stumbling block, but we were also expecting to face these sort of difficulties,” they said.
We had to change sampling which had a greater margin of error
The new electronic vote-counting system reduced to just three minutes a process of vote inheritance that normally takes more than three days.
A somewhat unforeseen issue the MEP election faced was that of predicting the outcome.
Around an hour after the counting day started, Nationalist Party sources were predicting a margin of as much as 60,000.
Labour eventually announced a victory of some 45,000, which was then increased to 48,000 and eventually even reaching 51,000.
The final actual result, however, was a somewhat more modest 42,000 margin for the PL.
Sources said the issue with estimating the result during the counting process cropped up because the sampling parties were able to take during the counting process was not as reliable as under the previous vote counting system.
“We used to take samples of 50 ballots from every ballot box. This would give us a pretty reliable indication. However, under this new regime, we had to change sampling which had a greater margin of error,” a source said.
Sources from both parties yesterday told the Times of Malta that had the result been as close as in pre-2013 elections, they would have likely waited far closer to the end of the counting process to announce a winner.
In a reaction, a spokesman for the Nationalist Party disputed the claims attributed to PN sources and said the PN sample on Sunday morning was very close to the end result.
"As declared by PN in its statement issued on Monday the PN made a conscious and responsible decision not to contradict the predictions aired on both TVM and ONE TV which were later also carried by the printed media the day after," a PN spokesman said.