Brief overall description

Based on provisions of the relevant election act or an act on the nationwide referendum (hereinafter referred to as “Act”) and in accordance with the Section 4 par. 2(c) of the Act No 89/1995 Sb, on the State Statistical Service, as amended, the Czech Statistical Office (hereinafter referred to as “the CZSO”) elaborates a binding system to find out and process results of elections or results of voting in a nationwide referendum (hereinafter referred to as “referendum”).

Following documents are an integral part of the system:

• Instructions for ward election committees how to proceed while implementing the binding system to find out and process results of elections and results of voting in a referendum.
• A technical project for collection, processing, and presentation of results of elections and results of voting in a referendum.
  Note: The technical project is an internal document of the CZSO.

The technology of processing of results of elections and results of voting in a referendum is implied by law in the following sense: after the ward election committee members undersign a record on the progress and the result of voting and the record is taken over in the CZSO within a specified period of time, the results of voting in the ward are thereby found out. The decision of the ward election committee is final in this respect and no other election (referendum) body is reviewing the results during their further processing.

During processing in the CZSO, the results are gradually added up for the relevant election territory (it is stipulated by the relevant Act; it applies to the CR as a whole, a region, an election district or a municipality); after adding up of results for all wards from which records were handed over (taken over), calculations stipulated by law are made to find out results of elections (or results of voting in a referendum). The final result is, for example, distribution of seats in a particular council or the final answer to a question posed in a referendum. 

The system of processing of results of elections (a referendum) is thus based on the following:

• capture and saving of results handed over by ward election committees at individual points of handover (temporary workplaces of the CZSO at authorised municipal authorities, authorities of city districts or city parts in the cities of Prague, Pilsen, Brno, and Ostrava);
• connection of the points of handover to data transmission network with a central node in the CZSO Prague and transmission of ward results from those points to the centre;
• saving of all ward results and their summarization in the central database in the CZSO Prague;
• ongoing providing of information about the summarization of results of voting in a way that enables a remote access (the web address: www.volby.cz);
• permanent presentation of results of elections (a referendum) including elementary results of voting from individual wards at the same web address.

The CZSO, right after it takes over a flawless record on the progress and the result of voting in a ward issues for the relevant ward committee a written document in the form of report from a computer, which proves that the results of voting from the relevant ward have been handed over for further processing in the CZSO in a flawless way. The document comprises: a verification copy of saved data as well as a protocol on their handover (takeover) for further processing (representatives of the ward committee thus have the possibility to check at the point of handover that the data saved for further processing in the CZSO comply with what has been written in the record).

Immediately after handing over of the document to the representatives of the ward committee, data for the relevant ward are added to the results of voting for the relevant territory in total. Afterwards, they are saved in the presentation system, in which they are (after connection via the Internet) available both as ongoing results during the processing of results as well as permanent results after announcement of the total election results by the State Electoral Committee.

After results of voting from all wards (from which the CZSO took over the record in the specified period of time) on the relevant territory are added up, the CZSO makes determined calculations (e.g. in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the CR it allocates seats to individual political entities and elaborates a list of elected deputies or their substitutes) and elaborates a report on the result of elections (a referendum), which it submits for a debate to the State Electoral Committee.