Digital Services of the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic - Integrated Electoral Information System (IVIS)

Assignment and its challenges

According to the law, the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic provides support for all types of elections and referendums. It also covers census of election results, which, so far, has been done purely manually. The collected data from individual districts were transferred on data carriers, from which they were subsequently transferred to a central database for its further processing and publication.

Information systems for processing individual elections and referendums were built on the Oracle database system. Processing was provided in an environment of interconnected local networks of the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, INFOSTAT, and district summarizing departments. These created a large private electronic network produced for purpose of processing election results.

Elections and referendums are held with different periodicity. Before, their preparation used to start half a year before the election date; in the case Considering technical and technological as well as legislative changes, an innovation or a comprehensive renewal of the entire information system was carried out, which was made by subsystems for the following items:

• elections to the National Council of the Slovak Republic;
• EP elections;
• election of the president;
• elections to municipal self-governing bodies (OSO);
• elections to the bodies of self-governing regions (OSK);
• referendum.

Approach

Within the initial phases of the project, an IVIS was designed in a way that it could hold all types of elections and referendums, from its preparatory phase through the processing up to the final outputs presenting the results. An architecture of solution was robustly designed to address any potential threats during elections. Redundancy at all layers of the system is a must as it supports several channels for receiving minutes and ensures data integrity, confidentiality and authenticity via its multiple check-ups.

The above mentioned solution speeds up data processing by receiving minutes on-line as well as by their visual comparison with the delivered version. Ensuring logical online control when sending an electronic form of minutes to a central database helps present interim results at various stages of processing a lot faster.

In addition to its integration at ISIS (Integrated Statistical Information System), IVIS is to provide the following services:

• Automatic central processing of data from minutes using a web service for:
  • receiving voting results;
  • control of data in minutes;
  • archiving of data in minutes.
• Support of processes for all types of elections:
  • election of the President of the Slovak Republic;
  • parliamentary elections;
  • elections to the bodies of self-governing regions;
  • municipal elections;
  • European elections;
  • referendums.

Result – benefits of the new solution

IVIS has been assisting in processing of all elections since 2014. Since its implementation, it has provided support to employees of the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, external collaborators as well as other persons involved in preparing elections and collecting and evaluating results, e. g. election commissions at all levels, representatives of municipalities, as well as members of specialised departments created to help prepare and process elections.

Thanks to the system we provided the citizens of the Slovak Republic with an opportunity to see processing of the results online.

In the post-implementation phase of the project, a hotline support, maintenance and development of the system has been provided, while considering customers’ needs and legislative changes.