After an election accident: the Federal Statistical Office holds cantons responsible

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The goal of the Federal Statistical Office (BFS) is for all cantons to use uniform election formats by 2027, Ulrich said in an interview with the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” (NZZ) published on Saturday.

The BFS is therefore following the recommendations of an administrative investigation conducted by the Ministry of the Interior following the disruption. After the October 22 elections, the statistics office published incorrect figures on party strength. Voter shares were given too high for the SVP, the Center and the FDP.

“I have to coordinate, but I can’t force anyone to do anything,” Ulrich now told NZZ. The cantons would rightly wonder what added value new processes will bring them. However, the federal government is increasingly realizing that it first needs harmonized data in order to benefit largely from digitalization. With common standards, Switzerland will make faster progress in digitalization, the BFS director said.

No standards have been defined yet

The cantons are currently not bound to specific data standards. During the elections, the 26 cantons used no fewer than 13 different data standards. The BFS had to develop its own import or read-in script for each of them.

Due to a programming error, the votes were counted multiple times and the party strengths were incorrectly calculated, the investigation showed. “The error had no influence on the distribution of seats in parliament,” Ulrich emphasized in the current interview.

The results on election day are always only provisional. About two to three percent of the provisionally published statistics are said to contain errors. The error culture at the BFS has always been good, says Ulrich. What is new is that the population better understands the complex handling of data. (SDA/them)

Source:Blick