And now, e-lections are here - Did you notice it on Sunday?
The push for the electronic voting machines comes on the heels of the nationwide local government elections held on Sunday, the first elections where votes at local levels were electronically processed through the National Elections Office's (KBW) central IT system, whose server is housed in its office next door to the Sejm. The elections also marked the first time that electronic signatures were used to authenticate voter results transmitted electronically as well as the first time that election results could be viewed online on the National Election Commission's (PKW) web site (www.pkw.gov.pl).
In addition, the elections served as another example of the country's so-called "e-government" initiatives to make Poland as "wired" as other Euroland countries as well as reduce the amount of government paperwork by replacing it with digitally processed information.
By the time of the EU accession referendum, KBW plans to use some electronic voting machines together with traditional polling stations, although a final decision has not yet been made.
About 120,000 electronic voting machines would be needed nationwide to replace polling stations, according to Andrzej Florczyk, the director of IT at KBW.
"We have to catch up with the West where the elections have already been computerised to a large extent," Florczyk said. "If it works, we might use them on a larger scale for our first election to the EU Parliament." These elections are scheduled for May 2004.
In between future elections, the voting machines would be used as "information points" to supply interested citizens with accessible information on government activities as well as contacts in local government offices, he said.
The electronic voting machines would also bring huge cost savings for the cash-strapped government. With each machine priced at €300-€350, savings would be realised after three elections, Florczyk said, despite the estimated total cost of €8.9 million-€10.4 million (zł. 36 million-zł. 42 million) for 120,000 machines.
The Oct. 27 elections, for example, cost about €22.3 million (zł. 90 million), with €7.4 million (zł. 30 million) for the paper for the ballots and €14.9 million (zł. 60 million) for the salaries of electoral commission members who monitored the voting, tallied the results and entered votes into the computer system, Florczyk said. The electronic machines, however, would save up to 90% on the cost of paper and 50% on election supervisors' salaries, he added.
But whether or not the government will actually have the resources for the new machines is another issue to be resolved.
"Computerisation isn't more common because of high costs," said Miłosz Wilkanowicz, an elections expert at KBW.
Computerised elections are not new to Poland. KBW's IT system has been developed since 1990, Florczyk said, although the Oct. 27 elections were the first time that it was used for all 2,900 regional electoral commissions at voivodship, gmina and powiat levels.
In Sunday's elections, KBW's central IT system processed votes for more than 300,000 candidates. As part of the project, more than 2,500 district elections commissions were equipped with PCs, modems and software to count votes and send them to the KBW via the Internet.
The IT system accounted for about €7.44 million (zł. 30 million.) of the election's total cost of €37.22 million (zł. 150 million), Wilkanowicz said.
All in all, the IT system would reduce the waiting period for the final results from Sunday's election from about two weeks to four or five days, according to Florczyk.
"These innovations as well as the IT implementation scale make the system an incomparable election undertaking to any previous one," said Eugeniusz Własiuk, the chief technology officer of Prokom Software, which supplied the programmes for KBW's IT system.
Besides being cost and time effective and providing a tool for making the elections more transparent, the IT system used in the elections was an "excellent example of a very practical usage of up-to-date technology in preparing our democracy for electronic voting in the future," Własiuk said.
Election officials are on different sides of the fence, however, when it comes to whether the use of high-tech systems will increase voter turnout in future elections.
"It has been proved worldwide that the computerisation of elections fosters turnout improvement and the growth of confidence in elections," Florczyk said.
His colleague Wilkanowicz disagreed.
"The turnout depends on how much the vo-ters are interested in the election itself, and not what's going on in the back," he said. "The public is not so familiar with computers, especially the older generation, so the fact that the election is computerised doesn't really bother them."
Of the country's 29 million registered voters, KBW anticipated a 50% turnout rate in Sunday's elections, though mainly due to high interest in the direct elections of mayors, Wilkanowicz said.
