This year, 2014, South Africa celebrated 20 years of freedom and democracy. Our fifth democratic elections also took place on 7 May, which brought a special sort of significance to the longevity of our Rainbow Nation and culminated in a virtual homage to our resilience as a people since 1994.

On Wednesday 30 April the national Results Operation Centre (ROC) was officially opened at the Tshwane Events Centre, just west of the capital city. The opening event was attended by a host of dignitaries including diplomats, civil organisation leaders, international observers and political party representatives.

While the 25 million people who registered to vote geared up to do their part, most would be unaware of the processes behind capturing and displaying the votes at the ROC. Obviously, this was no small feat and required much planning and technology to get it off the ground.

One company that has been heavily involved in the leader board aspects of the national elections since 2000 is local technical production specialists Lucidity, headed by Paul Newman. Head of AV at Lucidity Sean Moss also had a hand in bringing their services to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to fruition.

“The elections [results displays] have, in the past, always been quite rudimentary despite the IEC progressively pushing for a more advanced setup,’ says Newman. “In 2011 at the municipal elections we tested a new system that departed from the previous analogue system to LED and projection. The projection aspect were two 16’ x 12’ screens with the national results LED board in the middle.’

The previous system used by the IEC consisted of older character-based LED boards with physical printed plaques that displayed the party’s name. Each row that represented the party and its votes had eight character combinations for up to 99 million counts. These characters would then roll over as the votes came in.

Moss explains how the votes were captured for display on the previous boards: “The way it was set up was they would have nine PCs that would be linked up to their database. It would then capture the data and feed it through to an application which would then read that data and convert it to an analogue signal. That signal would get sent down a line to the older LED boards.’

This legacy system has been used since 1994 but brought problems such as difficulty in viewing the results at the bottom of the longer screens, such as with the Western Cape, which had more parties than other provinces. Plainly put, the system was antiquated.

For the 2014 elections the IEC was convinced a new digital system was the way forward and asked Lucidity to come up with something unique and different to what they had previously provided. Lucidity then pitched a couple of options with the IEC finally selecting a Dataton Watchout-driven system to move forward.

“The development and the behind-the-scene happenings required to enable us to do what we wanted to do were quite immense,’ says Newman. “We spent several months developing software which enabled us to grab the audited information from the IEC and display it on the screens in an extremely secure process.’

Custom screens were required so Lucidity employed the services of manufacturer Showtex out of Dubai to construct the two 12.5m x 7m screens which would ultimately flank the portrait-orientated LED screen in the centre. The DigiLED screen was supplied by AV Systems through Lucidity and measured 9m x 4m.

“The IEC wants to embrace the digital age,’ says Moss. “This year they had an iOS app where you could track the results, so they understand the importance of moving into that spectrum. So, a part of going that route was giving them the flexibility of what digital offers over analogue. What they wanted to do was have the flexibility to display not only the voting statistics but also geographical information from around the country as well as to screen the live daily press conferences. So we created a number of templates with various fields of information which we created in Watchout.’

While all the visuals happening on the front of the screens was the final result, much was going on in the background to ensure a smooth and hiccup-free election process. One of the key points of concern was full redundancy as an assurance that the screens would remain on for 24 hours a day throughout the election period. In order to achieve this each screen received two Christie Roadster HD14KM projectors (four in total) that got discrete feeds from a Watchout server fed from a matrix switch. On the other end of the matrix switch there were two Watchout servers – a primary and a backup – running slaved to ensure that in the event of a server loss, it would immediately switch to the backup. Each Watchout server was equipped with two Datapath E2S cards.

In choosing Watchout as opposed to other media servers Moss says: “There are a lot of media servers that can do a lot of different jobs, and they’re all great, but what I needed was to be able to read data in three different ways. So, what we were able to do with Watchout was – and, again it came down to the IEC’s security protocols – take live DVI feeds, take feeds over the network for the maps and in addition to that I needed to feed off of an image server.’

Lucidity worked closely with the IEC’s IT department to ensure that all information that was displayed on the screens was highly secure. To accomplish this Lucidity’s custom built SQL server (which interfaced with the IEC server), read the data, generated a graphical interface and spat out the three individual DVI feeds which drove each screen. Concurrently, an image server ran alongside the SQL server which took an image of the screens every 10 seconds, bringing a further level of redundancy in the event of a failure. PENMAC, Dataton distributors in South Africa, was also on site for technical support and backup. According to Newman, PENMAC’s support was key in choosing Dataton Watchout for the ROC.

“PENMAC and Lucidity over the years have developed a strong working relationship, and this high profile project required a lot of focus on detail,’ says Malcolm Finlay, PENMAC director. “The final outcome of the project for PENMAC and Dataton was very exciting in that the solution required more than just the display and visual power of Watchout, but also engaged much of the control features built into the platform which have led to its favoured user description as the “Swiss Army Knife’ of display tools.’

The wrap

The digital age has brought myriad new ways of disseminating information and how we interact with it. The fact that the IEC has taken the step to provide an iOS app for voters and has completely digitised the Results Operations Centre can only mean good things for our democracy and is hopefully a benchmark for our foray into the digital future. Indeed, the IEC has chosen to use this system in forthcoming elections, which says a lot about its robustness and proposed longevity.