The 2024 national elections did not go down well for the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). The length and breadth of the country saw long queues when the tablets being used to scan IDs failed. The IEC abandoned the voter management devices around lunchtime, leaving election officials to manually check people off from the voters’ roll. Some voters abandoned the queues. The commission first piloted the devices at scale in 2021, and then fully deployed them ahead of the general elections on May 29. The IEC paid R546mn for 40 000 of the devices from a Johannesburg firm called Ren-Form. The company is on record as saying that it was not responsible for the devices’ failure. But this setback has not derailed the IEC’s tech strategy, says chairperson Mosotho Moepya. “Yes, we were disappointed that the voter management devices didn’t work as planned and stalled the voting process, but this doesn’t mean we are abandoning these tools,” he said, adding that the IEC has taken time to understand what went wrong during the 2024 elections and has since attributed the technical glitch to a software flaw. According to Moepya, each time an official processed a voter, the app had to complete various tasks, but because everything was routed through a single processing thread, it led to timeouts. When a task timed out, instead of moving on, the app kept retrying, sometimes sending the same request thousands of times for a single voter, slowing the IEC’s system to a crawl. The devices also kept repeatedly checking for internet connectivity, which added even more strain. The error has since been fixed, and the devices have worked well during recent by-elections, Moepya says. Technology can speed up and streamline elections, but it can also make it harder to see what’s happening behind the scenes, says Moepya. For example, when a ballot is counted by hand in front of observers, the process is visible and verifiable, which is not the case when it’s processed by software. This is why transparency is essential when technology is used in any part of the electoral process, he adds.It won’t be too long before voting looks very different from what it