The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is on the hunt for an IT provider to help in digitising its manual tasks and supplying interoperable hardware for elections. The opportunity closes on 15 December.
The AEC’s interoperable devices are primarily used on election day for its electronic certified lists (ECL). ECLs replace paper-certified lists and allow polling officials to search lists of eligible voters and record electronically against the approved list of voters that a person has been handed a ballot paper.
AEC deployed 5,550 ECLs in the 2022 election. The 2019 election was the first time AEC rolled out its ECLs across all pre-poll voting, mobile teams, and major cities’ CBD polling places.
AEC said it is looking to upgrade its current ECLs. According to documents published on the request for expressions of interest, “analysis conducted after the 2019 federal election showed the ECL solution in its existing form was at its operational capacity, and unable to be scaled or responsive to evolving requirements without further investment.”
Hardware
In total, AEC predicts it will need approximately 12,000 devices, which can be broken down into 10,000 high-specification devices and 2,000 low-specification devices.
The high-specification devices will need to encrypt information on hard drives and run the AEC’s ECL application.
They must also be able to support Microsoft BitLocker, have removable secondary storage of at least 4GB, be able to be managed using Microsoft In-Tune.
The high-specification devices must also be able to be used by users with low digital literacy skills.
The low-specification devices will be required to run a web-based version of the AEC’s ECL application. They must be mobile and able to support AEC use the ServiceNow platform through a web browser, IOS, iPadOS and Android.
Digitising workflow
The AEC needs a partner to develop an application to digitise manual tasks completed by officers in charge of polling places, voting centres and mobile polling on election day and during pre-polling.
The application must integrate with AEC ServiceNow – IT service management capability, with the potential for a hybrid model to support helpdesk ticket processing between AEC and the respondent’s solution.
The application must have online and offline capabilities, the capacity to interact with digital content and media, a real-time reporting capability and the capacity to provide ongoing and scalable technical support to any application.
The respondent must be able to provide helpdesk level three break-fix support for the application and minor application enhancements.
The respondent must also be able to provide ‘heightened support’ for the application during an electoral event, including scaling up dynamically to support up to 15,000 temporary external end-users and 7,500 polling places.
AEC is yet to determine if its needs would be best met as a “bundled service” with the AEC paying for access to the use of products and services on an “as required” basis; or by purchasing products under the Digital Transformation Agency’s Digital Marketplace.
The solutions and services would have to meet a number of security requirements such as applicable mitigations for the Essential Eight (E8) strategies and the cyber supply chain risk management outlined in the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s guidelines.