Early Voting Opening Project

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

The Miami-Dade County Elections Department (Elections) oversees voting functions for over 1.4 million registered voters. It is the most populous county in Florida and the seventh-most in the United States. To better serve the constituents, Miami-Dade’s Supervisor of Election runs an Early Voting (EV) period of 14 days, prior to the official election day. As such, twenty-two Early Voting Sites, spread geographically throughout the county, are assembled and staffed during county-wide elections. The sites handle over half-a-million voters who take advantage of the early voting period.After several years of experience running these installations, and the challenges associated with monitoring them remotely from one centralized location, Elections administrative staff desired a tracking system to ensure each site opened by its designated start time. Elections partnered with Miami Dade County’s Information Technology Department (ITD) to implement a suite of GIS applications to effectively monitor the EV site’s opening status. The Early Voting Opening (EVO) system allows mobileand in-office updates of the operational status of each EV site, and an administrative desktop Dashboard to monitor the status of the 22 locations. EVO tracks whether an EV site is closed, has a hardware problem in need of attention, or open for voting.