Pretoria - The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will receive the United Nations Public Service Award (UNPSA) for Preventing and Combating Corruption in the Public Service.
The awards will be held in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, on Thursday.
The modern technology used during last month's municipal elections, which helped the IEC to deliver on its mandate of free and fair elections, enabled the IEC to win international acclaim in the process.
South Africa is a first place winner in the competition for its innovative use of results slip scanning.
A total of 36 public organisations worldwide will receive this prestigious award tomorrow on United Nations Public Service Day.
IEC chairperson Dr Brigalia Bam said: "Transparency is especially important to the IEC in ensuring that votes captured in the Electronic Results System can be easily verified against the votes as reflected in the results slip signed by the presiding officers and political party representatives in each voting station."
Afterwards, results slips are taken to the municipal electoral offices where they get scanned before being verified by independent auditors.
The IEC introduced the process of scanning results slips during the 2009 National and Provincial Elections (NPE).
More than 38 000 results slips were printed with barcodes and scanned at the results capturing sites in order to provide a visual image paired to an electronic result.
The use of bar codes enabled the automation of linking the scanned image with an electronic record of the captured results.
The new functionality implemented for the NPE, also used for the 2011 Municipal Elections, was made available to all IEC staff at national office, nine provincial offices and more than 300 municipal offices.
Innovation was achieved by using the latest image scanning and custom application development technologies to support the South African democratic process.
The solution utilised a combination of new scanner hardware, integrated packaged and custom software to scan, index, store and display the result slips.
The IEC sees the following benefits from results slip scanning; complete process transparency to all users. Improved legitimacy and acceptability of election results; improved accuracy and efficiency of the audit process with a record decrease in audit queries; providing minimal impact on the parallel business processes or the business infrastructure.
The United Nations Public Service Awards is the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service.
In November 2010, the IEC received an award from the Centre for Public Sector Innovation (CPSI) for its "innovative use of information communication technology for effective service delivery" for this process.
In May 2011, the IEC was the first runner up at the All Africa Public Sector Innovation Awards (AAPSIA) in Kenya in the category "Innovative Service Delivery Improvements".
