Italian Paper Electoral Procedures

In almost 60 years of democracy in Italy there have NEVER been any problems with the vote counts or declaration of the election results. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, which were years of strong contrasts between the two main political parties (Communist and Christian Democrats), NO-ONE ever questioned the legitimacy of the electoral results.

How is this possible?

SNIP...The counting procedures are the following:

26. Ballot papers (voted and not voted) must remain, at all times, inside the polling room they started off in. The ballot boxes are visible to everybody at all times. Ballot papers are only taken to their final destination when the counting is over and the results of the polling room are made public.

27. Each ballot paper is checked by all six of the polling station workers and any of the parties representatives. In case of disagreement about who to assign the vote to, the president decides temporary "position", but that ballot paper is sent to Court for a final decision. The counting is simultaneously managed by two scrutineers who both have their own paper record. Paper records have one page for each party and candidate, each page is made of small numbered squares: 1, 2, 3, 4 and so forth. As each vote is assigned to a party (and/or a candidate) scruteeners find its page on their own paper record, cross the next empty square and loudly read its number. All the time the two voices say the same number there are no problem, as soon as they differ everybody stops and check what has happened.
The final result of each party (and/or candidate) is simply the number of the last crossed little square of its own paper record.

At this point the 2006 electronic data collection was carried out: the name of the party/candidate voted on each ballot paper was put on a PC. At voting closure the electronic result was compared with the manual one and in case of discordance the official result was that of the manual count.

28. At the end of the count, each polling room sends all the ballot papers and the official stamp to the competent authorities along with one copy of the official statement, signed by all six workers of the polling room. These are kept for a number of years. The government calculates the official figures from the official reports of the polling rooms. The second copy of the statement is collected by the local authorities.

The electronic data collection stated that same polling room would have send their results directely to the Ministry of Interiors using computers. Such data transmission was experimental.

29. Each local authority collects the results of its polling rooms and therefore calculates the results on a local level, independently of the national government.

30. Even parties calculate the results independently, since they have their representatives in each polling room. They can therefore compare their calculations with those of the government.


http://www.electronic-vote.org/TERMINI/italians_en.php