Ten years ago, voters and political parties were willing to turn a blind eye on the amateurish shambles the transitional Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) made of the technology it tried to use to gather and tally votes. The permanent IEC administering today’s election won’t enjoy the same forbearance if its systems fail.
Long before the results of 1994’s election were finally announced, the results control centre (RCC) responsible for tabulating ballots had collapsed. The reason for its closing — given by the transitional IEC’s chairperson, Judge Johann Kriegler — was that a hacker had breached its counting centre’s security and tampered with the results.
Nothing has ever been heard about this hacker since. According to volunteers who worked as data entry clerks at the RCC, the chance of there ever having been a hacker is unlikely. The problem appears to have been that the IEC was using antiquated technology. There was little networking for anyone to hack. Voting stations were sending in tallies by fax, not via the internet.
The IEC apparently vastly underestimated its logistics, and there weren’t nearly enough terminals or data entry clerks to cope. The errors Kriegler blamed on a hacker appear to have been caused by bugs in spreadsheet macros and typos from moving data from fax to computer.
By the time Kriegler shut the RCC down, hopes of properly auditing the results lay in ruins anyway. Poor training of IEC electoral officers running regional voting stations had made strict ballot reconciliation impossible.
A bad choice of technology compounded by untrained users left South Africa’s first free and fair election with a permanent blemish. There is now widespread suspicion that the final election results weren’t calculated by counting the votes people cast after patiently queuing for hours in the sun, but by letting political parties do backroom horse-trading.
Thankfully, no similar technical glitches were reported in 1999’s election. Some opposition parties griped that the IEC was too much under the ruling party’s thumb. The reason for creating an electoral commission in the first place was that opposition parties felt the Department of Home Affairs, which administered the whites-only elections before 1994, wasn’t independent enough for the job.
But now, according to its critics, the IEC has come to resemble a government department much like the Department of Home Affairs rather than an independent commission.
A serious structural problem with the 1994 IEC was that the same body that administered the election got to judge if it was free and fair. Since 1999’s election, the IEC’s role has been limited to administration. The decision on whether an election is free and fair is left to emerge from courts resolving electoral petitions on a case-by-case basis.
So if the IEC’s networks or computers don’t do their job today, expect endless wrangling over the results by opposition parties.
On the net:
Independent Electoral Commission
Explanation of South Africa’s electoral system
History of 1994 election
Special Report: Elections 2004