On October 22, the Italian region of Lombardy held an autonomy referendum. To organize such crucial vote, authorities relied on Smartmatic as technology and services provider. 24,700 touch screen voting machines were deployed across the entire region to capture the vote of the 7,895,484 eligible voters. This was Italy’s first fully automated election. With nearly 10 million inhabitants, Lombardy is Italy’s most populated region.
Lombardy is also the most prosperous region in Italy, with GDP per capita about 35% higher than the European average.
Technology
Understanding that no two elections are identical, Smartmatic customizes its solutions to meet the specific requirements of each customer.
A4-210 voting machine
The A4-210 voting machine is designed to facilitate a secure and convenient vote in simple elections, such as referenda. It provides voters with an intuitive voting experience, and poll workers an easy, intuitive functionality that requires minimal training. Because it is compact, portable and self-contained, the A4-210 optimizes logistics and streamlines processes.
In Lombardy, 1,300 voting machines were equipped with external printers allowing authorities to verify the integrity of the election by comparing the printed copies of the votes and tallies with the electronic count.
Election Management Platform (EMP)
This intuitive platform was designed to guide election administrators through the process of managing the election. For the referendum, the EMP comprised four main components: election configuration, results management, turnout management and results publication.
- Election Configuration System (ECS): An application that generates all the data needed to conduct an election, from candidate nomination to voting machine configuration. In Lombardy, ECS was used to configure all the voting machines and connected technologies.
- Results Management System (RMS): Results were securely transmitted from the consolidation centers to the central database. The RMS’ stringent security mechanisms guaranteed the integrity of results.
- Turnout Management System: Each municipality was able to monitor voter participation during the referendum.
- Election Night Reporting (ENR): Smartmatic recognizes that the timely delivery of accurate election results is key to the credibility of any modern democratic process. ENR offered authorities the possibility to post results on the web in near real-time.
Services
Smartmatic provided a complete suite of services to help authorities successfully conduct the election.
- Warehouse set up to receive, store and configure the voting machines.
- Configuration of the entire automated election platform.
- Project manage the automation of the election.
- Deployment of the voting machines to and from the field.
- Reconfiguration of the voting machines after the election for other uses.
- Thorough source code review for increased transparency.
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