Absentee Ballot Tracker

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2009

In 2008, the Oakland County Clerk’s Office began offering absentee ballot voters a new service that would allow them to go online to track their ballots through the election process and confirm that their ballots were received by their local city or township clerk. The system, inspired by a neighboring county’s system, was built internally by Oakland County’s IT Department and uses data entered by local clerks into Michigan’s Qualified Voter File. The service is located on the Oakland County Clerk’s website. To check the status of their absentee ballots, voters simply have to enter their last name, birth year, zip code, and their street address number to find out: the date their absentee ballot application was received by their local clerk; the date their clerk mailed out their ballot; and the date that their completed ballot was received by their clerk. During the 2008 election year, the website had 16,428 page views by voters interested in tracking their ballot through the online system from July through November. Oakland County, with more than 915,000 registered voters, has a large population of voters who choose to cast their votes by absentee ballot.