ECES (www.eces.eu) and Democracy Essentials (DE) have collaborated since their establishment in 2010 in developing ICTs applications for electoral stakeholders, especially Electoral Management Bodies and Civil Society Organizations.
Thanks to the longstanding collaboration between the Founder of ECES Fabio Bargiacchi and the founder of DE Khaldoun Dudin and their experience in promoting electoral and democratic strengthening, we have jointly created several apps and guidelines to support electoral stakeholders and practitioners in their tasks, including the development of electoral forms and ballot paper design.
DE is a Brussels based enterprise which plays an important role in providing services in the wide domain of democracy support. It offers ICT related technical expertise applied in the fields of electoral assistance and observation, parliamentary and political party development, media and elections, migration and development.
Through this partnership, we have therefore produced the Electoral Results Aggregator (for EMBs and CSOs) application which is tailor to the need of the different countries we are working with, mainly in Africa and the Middle East.
The Electoral Results Aggregator (for EMBs and CSOs) system comprises various components that work together to process and provide real-time updates of election results. The scheduler engine is responsible for initiating three communication channels that help in result processing, including a call to the electoral commission for result directory download, a call to the backend engine for polling station results form data extraction, and a call to the backend engine for tally centre results form data extraction. The Results File Downloader provides the functionality to download, decompress result files from the electoral commission APIs, and persist relevant data to the database. The system's front-end web application is built in Angular 9 and comprises various features, including a dashboard showing total votes per candidate and percentage of total votes, web pages for entering and verifying PS and PC data, a login page, a mechanism to edit wrongly keyed-in data, and a webpage to compare PS and PC data on the constituency level. The system is designed with optimal performance in low-bandwidth locations, user-friendly interface, integrated with backend for real-time updates, and secured with endpoints to ensure authorized access to the services.
Picture 1: Main page of the Electoral Results Aggregator showing the results per candidate and their disaggregation per constituency. The main page also shows the number of polling stations imported in the system and the total number of voters.
Picture 2: Example of page showing the results of the two polling stations inside a specific constituency with the percentage, number of voters and the possibility to download the polling station result form.
