It was a test that Commissioner Bob Longland was confident the new system would pass and one that would demonstrate its ability to streamline the election process, while maintaining the ECQ's high standards of accuracy and accountability.

When an election is called, the ECQ downloads the name and address data for every Queensland voter from the Australian Electoral Commission.  This data is formatted and printed onto electoral rolls, then distributed to each of the 89 voting districts where electoral staff use them to record voting activity for each booth.

The previous system relied on processes that had very low print tolerances and were proprietary in nature, a combination that led to high levels of wastage and consequently a high cost of production to the commission.

At the conclusion of an election the rolls need to be processed and reconciled to determine who had not voted and, more importantly, who had cast a vote more than once.

Previously, a hardware based line scanning system was used.  This technology was more than 20 years old and was only able to process restricted target areas on the page.  Importantly, it could not cater for any other information that may be written on the roll.  The associated reconciliation process at the end of the election was a very manual one and involved many people physically checking hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper for possible multiple votes.

"It was not particularly reliable and it required absolute precision in the printing process.  So we were looking for a solution that overcame those timing and cost issues," Longland explains.

With Salmat's assistance, the ECQ introduced the Electoral Roll Masters Production and Scanning System.  The new system has improved electoral roll design, provides comprehensive tracking and security features, and includes a streamlined data capture process.

The system is based on the latest scanning technology that enables the entire electoral roll page to be captured to a digital image, aligned and then interrogated by sophisticated software in the one pass.

The use of this scanning technology enabled the rolls to be printed on to plain paper, significantly reducing the print complexity and cost.  A key feature is that a barcode is placed on every page, so that the page can be easily identified, enabling reconciliation down to the individual voter level.

Longland says the new system has dramatically improved the efficiency of the alignment and printing process.

"We previously had to have a pre-printed paper stock to help with that alignment and the new system has reduced our wastage to almost zero in terms of the print process," he says.

The system includes a web-based election set-up tool to allow authorised ECQ staff to access the system 24 hours a day from any location.  Web-based tracking of the lists is available on the system, allowing lists to be easily and accurately tracked before, during and after the election.

At the end of an election, all lists are returned to us for scanning and are checked for discrepancies.  Voter reconciliation also occurs at this point and people who have cast more than one vote are then sent letters requesting an explanation.

All voting data will now be stored only on indexed CDs, enabling quick and easy access and vastly improved storage when compared with the mountains of paper previously filed.  One of the greatest advances of the new system is the ability to quickly and accurately pinpoint people who have voted more than once, just by looking at the rolls on a screen.

Longland says the ECQ now expects to achieve 100 per cent accuracy when it comes to rooting out multiple voters.  "Previously, we would have to go to the physical page - find that in amongst hundreds of thousands of pages in the warehouse - pull that page out, compare the mark, and make the decision," he says.

"Now we don't need to do that - the system throws it up on a screen and you can make that judgment very quickly and accurately.

The system was used with great success in the Maryborough by-election in April 2003.

"We were fortunate that we had an opportunity to test it in a live sense well prior to a general election.  It was only one district and a small number of rolls, but it all happened without any drama and it happened very quickly," says Longland.  "My expectation is that in a general election we could expect to save in excess of $100,000 on the standard process."

The system is the first of its type in Australia and Longland is making other states and territories aware of its benefits. The Federal Electoral Commission recently put out a tender for a similar system, he says.

"It's a high-tech solution, but a low-risk solution and that combination is pretty rare these days.  It really has helped us to make an advance in the whole scanning and electoral operations process.  We're pretty chuffed about it."

When you need to interpret and reconcile markings made on the best part of one million pages of electoral rolls at the end of a state election, the last thing you want is to have to search for a single piece of paper only to find out that the mark in question is actually a coffee stain.

This was the kind of manual task that was taking up a significant amount of ECQ time and that we wanted to eliminate with the new system, says Queensland Sales Manager, Tim Bailey.

"We run all of the paper through high-volume, high-speed document scanners, which in turn convert them into electronic images.

"The images that are now stored in our content repository are interrogated by software that we specifically designed for the process.