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Electronic Voting Registry
Central State Office for Public Administration
Croatia

The Problem

Central State Office for Administration (CSOA) is the Governmental body in charge of civil service, as well as state, regional and local public administration management and citizen affairs. CSOA is the central body which coordinates the work of a network of Offices for Public Administration situated in each of the 20 Croatian Counties, as well as registrar offices strewn across the country in about 240 locations.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The service consists of the ability of citizens to send inquiry about their status to the voting registry either through a website or via SMS. The results of the inquiry are then instantly visible on the website, or sent back to the citizens via SMS. The service includes complete back-end integration, and a modern multi-channel delivery on a top of a secure IT infrastructure.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
In 1998, the Then Ministry of Public Administration started equipping registrar offices with software application for database management of civil registries data.
In 2003, Central State Office for Administration (CSOA) started providing the citizens with the service of checking voting registries via World Wide Web and SMS.
2005-onward, CSOA conducts modernisation of database management systems in the local offices across the nation in order to deepen and widen the scope of electronic delivery of public services in the area of civil registries.

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
Registrars in the Republic of Croatia keep records of personal data of citizens, widely known as registries of birth, marriage and death certificates, books of residents and voting registries. On basis of these records citizens can exercise their rights under the Constitution and other laws.

The then Ministry for Public Administration started to transform the business of registrar offices as early as 1998, by creating and then implementing a unique software application for this purpose and by providing the registrar offices with necessary IT equipment.

In the beginning, the project was rather local in nature, with different databases existing in different counties. Today, the project makes it possible to replicate local county data into the central database managed in Central State Office for Administration.

This was truly a gargantuan project, judging by the size of the database. At this point, there are over 30 million entries, with 63% of all data in civil registries already digitalized. Data in voting registries, on the other hand, are already digitalized in whole. At its inception, the goal of the project was to provide registrar offices with unique software to streamline data entry.

In 2003, the newly sworn Government of the Republic of Croatia set out to create a coherent environment for offering modern public services. At the forefront of this effort was the One-Stop Shop program which was intended to offer integrated multi-channel delivery of public services to citizens and businesses, utilizing information technology and modern organisational principles for the public sector. The main area for IT transformation, beside land and judicial data, were civil registries, because of their paramount importance for citizen rights.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
As with other similar projects embraced in the One-Stop Shop initiative, the purpose of the project was to cater to the wants and needs of citizens by offering fast, secure and inexpensive public services through an integrated multi-channel delivery, utilizing the best available technology.

Voting registries serve to prove the identity of all citizens eligible for voting on either Parliamentary, Presidential or Local elections. Upon voting, citizens are entitled to check the data in the registries so that they may know on which polling station they can vote. This is particularly important in cases where citizens have changed their place of residence from one municipality to the other, whereby they may not be sure on which polling station they may exercise their right. They may want to know their status very early on so that they can make arrangements for voting outside their home municipality, where they may happen to find themselves at the time of elections. At the polling station, the Electoral committee member checks the data for every voter against the voting registry.

Voting registries are maintained and corrected across the network of Offices for State Administration in Croatia’s 20 counties. These Offices fall under the authority of the Central State Office for Administration (CSOA), which is the Government body in charge of civil service, as well as state, regional and local public administration management and citizen affairs. The data collected and maintained locally is replicated in the central database managed in the CSOA before the elections.

Voting registry contains the following identifiers: Name and Surname, Unique Identification Number, Date of Birth, Place of Residence as well as other data needed for accurate voter authentication. As of 2003, voters are given the opportunity to access voting registries with their Unique Identification Number via World Wide Web and SMS. The former channel is constantly available to the citizens, while the latter only one month before the elections take place.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The CSOA devised following strategies for this electronic service to fulfil:

- to increase voter turnout by increasing transparency and availability of voting registries data,
- to achieve back-end integration of different information systems by using modern database management tools and interoperability schemes, across a wide array of agencies,
- to achieve greater organisational efficiency and inter-agency coordination by introducing revised business practices and modern document management procedures,
- to offer to the citizens seamless delivery by designing fast and secure front-end applications.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
With this service accessible to them, citizens are enabled to access their data, without having to look up the registries on their own. It also ensured the transparency of the voting process as each voter could now have a better knowledge of how to exercise his/her right.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The sustainability of the project is ensured through a payment system which sees a small fee deducted from each user’s mobile phone account upon every inquiry to the voting registry via SMS. The fees are collected by a major telecom operator, which is the provider of the service. Thanks to this payment scheme, there are no restraints on the national budget. The website application, on the other hand, is designed and maintained by an outsourced partner.

Transferability of the project is ensured through a common ICT Infrastructure, upon which rely all the electronic services envisaged by the One-Stop-Shop program. With voting registries being handled within a common database system together with the other civil data registries, the success of the project will make an impact on how the other civil registries are handled, especially with respect to birth-marriage-death certificates that are yet to be delivered electronically.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The only setback of the project was that only one out of two mobile operators that existed on the market at the time agreed to offer their service to the Government. This meant that the SMS-based voting registry service would have been available only to those using the service of this particular mobile services provider, who at present covers about 60% of the mobile telecommunications market. There are currently four mobile phone operators that at least support the GSM standard, whereas most of them support the advanced UMTS standard. It is of utmost importance then to reach out to other providers, and thus create a more competitive environment, the one that would entail enlargement of the scope, better quality and greater sophistication of the service, higher network value attached to the service and a lower price.

There was also a lack of publicity attached to the service that otherwise could have increased the rate of usage. Still, there were already 56,000 visits to the website, and as many as 3000 SMS inquiries recorded in a single day. Due to intermittent demand for the service - i.e., only around election date - future awareness-raising campaigns should primarily focus on these periods.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   Central State Office for Public Administration
Institution Type:   Government Department  
Contact Person:   Leda Lepri
Title:   IT section head  
Telephone/ Fax:   +38512357694
Institution's / Project's Website:   +38512357607
E-mail:   llepri@uprava.hr  
Address:   Maksimirska 63
Postal Code:   10000
City:   Zagreb
State/Province:   HR
Country:   Croatia

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