Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 11 | Page 18

TRENDING T oday in the ‘paper voting’ election process, paper ballots are counted by hand or by using Optical Mark Recognition (OMR). But with OMR, the marks need to be made in very specific places. The legacy approaches are more sensitive and therefore prone to errors, plus the overall process is slower. Digitising ballots is important because it offers governments the ability to show transparency & accuracy in a vital democratic process, while also being able to provide results quickly. David Whitton, General Manager of Kodak Alaris Information Management - Eastern Cluster (Middle East, Africa, East Europe, Turkey & Russia) says, “The future of elections is undoubtedly digital technology and most electoral management bodies must adopt new solutions to improve the electoral process, both in terms of speed and transparency of the results. Digital in this case doesn’t mean electronic voting but rather digitising ballot papers and processing the information after it’s scanned. The requirement for this is a reliable scanning and software solution to help save time and reduce errors when tallying the votes.” The Kodak Alaris solution is versatile, as a number of election bodies have seen. The ballots can be presented in any orientation and it handles 18 INTELLIGENTCIO BESIDES THE SECURITY, COMPLIANCE, TIME SAVINGS AND REDUCTION OF ERRORS, ONE OF THE MAIN BENEFITS IS THAT THE SOLUTION RESULTS IN TRANSPARENCY AND REASSURES THE PUBLIC THAT THE PROCESS IS LEGITIMATE varying sizes of ballot papers, which is dictated by the number of candidates on the ballot. All of the scanning takes place within one unit. This allows the solution to be centrally administered with the v