Microsoft's Open XML standard has allegedly gathered enough votes to pass as a certified an ISO standard, several websites reported today, but the actual official vote count will only be announced tomorrow. Almost 90 national bodies have voted on the issue in the ballot which closed Saturday night.

At least two websites, such as OpenSourcerer and OpenDocSociety, have published alleged leaked copies of the ballot result which show 24 out of 32 of the "Principal Countries" involved in the process voted in favor of OOXML becoming the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard. This amounts to 75 percent, more than the 66 percent needed. At the same time, only 10 out of 71, or 14 percent, of those national member bodies disapproved of OOXML becoming an official standard.

If officially confirmed, the results show that the Microsoft request for fast-track approval of OOXML was approved. Even though that initially it appeared to be a serious stretch for Microsoft to actually pass their format, several countries changed their vote from disapproval to approval just before a Friday deadline.

OOXML, the default file-saving format of Microsoft Office 2007, is actually a rival to an already approved open standard, the already ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF). A lot of experts argue that having two competing similar open standards defeats the purpose of having open formats in the first place. Others allege that Microsoft built the format on purpose very complicated so it can't be fully translated into another format.

In early March, a stunning number of over 100 delegates from 32 countries attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva, which had to resolve the even more amazing 1,100 (yes, more than one thousand) comments registered by the 87 National Bodies which voted last summer with respect to Microsoft's specification that itself exceeds... 6,000 (yes, six thousand) pages. The BRM was hosted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).