Case Study - Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors

Project Scope

The Coordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) project allows access at a national level to electoral registration data that is gathered and maintained locally. This allows organisations that are allowed access to this data, such as political parties and credit reference agencies, to collect the data in a single format regardless of the IT system on which the original data is held. Similarly, when an election is called, election systems can receive data in a single format everywhere in the country.

The objectives of CORE are to:

• help improve the integrity of electoral registers
• give convenient national access to standard electoral registration data that continues to be locally collected and maintained
• help support modernisation of the voting process
• increase the efficiency of electoral administration
• provide for the preparation of reports centrally, based on the national dataset.

Project Description

Our main involvement in the project was to use the Election Markup Language (EML) customisation mechanism, which we had developed on behalf of OASIS, to tailor EML to this requirement. This was typical of many such projects we have undertaken, in that we were dealing with independent software vendors (ISVs) who are more used to competing than co-operating, and working with them and the Ministry to come up with a workable profile of EML for this application. As is often the case, the ISVs were not all familiar with XML, so we provided some training and advice during the project.

Because electoral registers are large datasets, we also conducted performance trials for parsing and validation of the XML messages, and wrote some papers recommending XML processing techniques that gave better performance than the "brute force" validation that many XML neophytes use.

We are an XML Spy training partner.

Please email for more information.