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Polls chief takes responsibility for election night computer chaos
The computer chaos over the release of last Saturday’s local council election results has led to the Election Commission (EC) deciding that in future elections it will fax result sheets to the media instead of posting them on its website as results are released.
Election Commission Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya addressing the media. Pic by Amila Gamage
The decision came after a new computer programme the EC had developed in collaboration with the Kelaniya University’s Faculty of Computing and Technology crashed embarrassingly, making it impossible to release results via the EC’s website.
The EC’s official Facebook page, in the meantime, was uploading photos of results sheets from individual wards periodically, adding to the confusion. Media institutions were still sent results sheets by fax through the Government Information Department. This arrangement, however, also did not go fully according to plan, with some results being faxed to media institutions only on Monday night.
The EC had still not uploaded results of the local council elections on its website as of yesterday. Even results from earlier elections were unavailable. Commission officials said work was ongoing to get the results back online, while they were also planning to release on February 28 a booklet containing all results and statistics related to last Saturday’s local council elections.
Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Election Commission Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya accepted responsibility for what had occurred, but he insisted that neither the computer programme nor those who developed it should be blamed.
Mr Deshapriya, though, maintained that by 8.30am on Sunday (11), people in about 75 per cent of wards in the country knew the results of their respective wards.
“There was no delay in releasing the results of individual wards,” the EC Chairman argued, adding that the delay was in releasing those results to the media and the wider public.
In previous elections, including the 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections, it was the Colombo University’s School of Computing that had provided the software solutions.
Mr Deshapriya explained that they had been working with three key officials from the Colombo University’s School of Computing. Of these three, one had passed away and another had moved to another institution during the intervening period between 2015 and 2018. The only remaining official had told the EC that he was unable to assist them on this occasion. Consequently, for the 2018 local council elections, the Commission had sought the assistance of a team led by Dr Gamini Wijayarathna, Dean of the Kelaniya University’s Faculty of Computing and Technology. The programme the Kelaniya University offered was designed to update the Election Commission website with the results while collating data at district level. Documents containing the data were to be faxed to the EC to be compared against the digital data set for double verification. All data should have been available online for final computing.
When officials started testing the programme on February 9, they had noticed that if there was a delay in entering data even in one area, no results would show up in the system. This glitch was to have catastrophic consequences on election night. “We had results from all wards of the Ambalangoda Urban Council faxed to us by 10 pm, but when we entered them into the system, we noticed that the results weren’t tallying. This was because in one ward, the postal votes had been added into the final count. This resulted in the entire system crashing. As such, we had to completely change the whole format and enter data from scratch,” Mr Deshapriya said.
Mr Deshapriya explained that the EC could have released results of each ward, but that electronic media had wanted the wards tallied and a final result released for each local body. One could also not blame the electronic media for that, as that would have required them to report the results of 4,995 wards, he pointed out.
The EC Chairman also noted that the Commission had earlier stated that all results would be released by Sunday noon. This, however, had been delayed by about four hours, with final results being released by about 4.00 pm, he claimed.
Given what happened, however, results would hereafter be released only through fax by the Commission. The Government Information Department would then send out the results to media institutions.
Dr Gamini Wijayarathna, Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, said the system which failed on February 10 had been developed only three weeks before the election.
“Ideally, it should have been developed over two months ago but we did it at short notice,” he told the Sunday Times. Dr Wijayarathna however, refused to be drawn into the system’s specifics, stating that several erroneous accounts regarding the system which had appeared in the media had embarrassed the faculty. “As such, the Vice-Chancellor has told me not to make further comments about this to the media and to let the EC handle the matter,” he said.