Ballot Remake System

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2009

With well over four million registered voters, Los Angeles County will process as many as 250,000 provisional ballots from voters who attempted to vote at a poll where they were not found on the voter roster. The tabulation of eligible provisional ballots requires that each ballot be adjudicated to ensure that only votes on contests for which the voter is eligible to vote are counted. When a voter casts a ballot outside the home precinct, the ballot must be remade if the precinct where the ballot was cast has a different ballot style than the home precinct. The process of adjudicating a ballot cast in the wrong precinct to only count votes for eligible contests has been a labor intensive challenging process of manually comparing two slates of contests and deciding which contests are common to both ballots and then making the new ballot to capture the voter’s intent. To greatly reduce staffing requirements, accelerate the ballot making process and ensure greater accuracy, the Department’s Information Technology Branch developed an automated provisional ballot remake process, which produced an approximate 200% increase in productivity and verifiable accuracy with enhanced audit trail capabilities.