1. Background
The National Elections Authority (NEA) is the body responsible for managing and supervising the electoral process and referendums in Egypt. This includes managing the presidential elections and the constitutional referendum. The pool of voters in Egypt is over 50 million citizens, but a significant percentage of eligible voters do not vote. Also, voters outside of Egypt had not participated in elections before the 2012 elections.
2. Client Requirements
The NEA wanted an online system that provided all the necessary information for voters inside and outside of Egypt to participate in the process. This included voting locations, dates, candidate information, official announcements, timelines and detailed results. It was important to enable out of-country voters to vote in real time, just as it was important to create a system whereby observers could follow up on the progress and transparency of the elections process.
3. The Challenges
The system had to support on-site inquiries from millions of users without that causing any trouble to the system. It also had to maintain an enormous amount of secured data, provide real time voting for out-of-country voters, organize the internal organizational flow for the Elections Authority, including the registration and review process for observers, and manage the results of the election.
4. The Solutions
eSpace designed a Multi-Channel Voting Inquiry system that enabled voters to learn about polling details and locations through: A website, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), SMS and other mobile means. We also designed a system that enabled the Elections Management Body (EMB) to manage the elections observers’ applications process. In order to facilitate voting from outside the country, eSpace developed and Out-of-Country Voters Module that allowed expatriates to vote in embassies around the world during the election days using either their national ID or their passport. An Out-of-Governorate Module was also designed to enable citizens to vote from outside of their governorate.
Further, a Candidates Management System was designed to enable parliamentary candidates to register and to have symbols assigned to them. It also stated their status (accepted, rejected, withdrawal, …).
The system also handled the internal results entry per constituency per subcommittees along with calculating the winners per each constituency. eSpace helped in managing the results through a Result Management System which enabled officials to enter results for each candidate as the elections were ongoing for each subcommittee. The results would then be published on the elections website.
5. The Outcome
An online portal that easily and smoothly facilitates the process of elections and referendums in Egypt. eSpace has empowered all 10 elections, including referendums and the presidential and parliamentary elections that took place in Egypt from 2011 until today. The portal served more than 250 million inquiries without any downtime.
