Last Sunday night’s vote counting process in the MEP elections was not the swift affair many were expecting for the introduction of Malta’s new electronic counting system.
Although many were expecting the entire process to be over in just a few hours, the final result came well after midnight.  
Political party electoral insiders told the Times of Malta that one of the main reasons the process took so long was that throughout the counting process, electoral officials faced problems of vote reconciliation. 
“In a number of instances, we faced scenarios where a ballot box that was meant to contain 500 votes, actually contained 499, or say 501,” a source said.  
In some cases this was because of a minor error committed by the Electoral Commission officials. However, in several other instances, they discovered that voters had placed their completed ballot for the MEP election in the ballot box meant for the local council election. 
“We had to open around 150 or 200 boxes from the local council elections to find missing votes. This process takes quite some time, and needs to be done rigorously,” the source said, pointing out that it would have been a better idea had the two ballots…