ELECTRONIC print and mailing house Zipform conducted its own military exercise in a two-week period last month, producing 926,000 postal voting packages for the WA Electoral Commission.
Between April 3 and April 17 Zipform designed, printed and collated custom-made packages for individual wards in 55 different electorates.
Different sections of the project team operated around the clock at some stage during this time — collecting photos, designing and laying out candidate information slips and ballot papers, printing and then collating the packs.
It was no easy task, given the packs comprised 5.275 million separate items.
“The printing is incidental,” Zipform general manager Lui Marcelli said.
“The project is essentially the programming and the data management, the matching of this data.” Mr Marcelli said auditors from the WA Electoral Commission, who must approve every piece of paper, vetted the whole operation.
“Even the commissioner was sitting in our office doing this, some days,” he said.
Project manager and Zipform marketing manager Jeremy Emms said the company invested in new art, design and mailing technology to take on this year’s job.
Zipform won this job on competitive tender, a repeat performance of the elections two years ago and intends to tender again.
“We are the only supplier in town capable of producing high-quality inkjet barcodes so the voting responses can be audited,” Mr Emms said.
“We have won the tenders because we can cope with the artwork, guarantee security and get the job done in a very small period of time.”
Things have returned to normal around Zipform’s Canning Vale headquarters — churning out Lotto tickets, 80 per cent of Australia’s EFTPOS rolls, gaming coupons for every Australian casino, financial statements, and vehicle registration forms and stickers.
Sixty tonnes of this goes to Eastern Australia each week.
“We touch most Australians every week,” Mr Marcelli said.
