Elections Administrative Troubleshooter Routing System

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

The Miami-Dade County Elections Department (Elections) oversees voting functions for over 1.4 million registered voters, utilizing 609 distinct polling boards across 871 voting precincts. The large number of locations, and associated volume of equipment, supplies and staff, spread over a wide geographic area, is always prone to a small percentage of challenges on Election Day. In order to respond quickly to issues, a team of Administrative Troubleshooters (ATS) visit each polling site numerous times throughout Election Day. Weeks before an election, administrative staff would gather the precinct allocation spreadsheets, manually use paper maps to group the closest stops, train and assign almost 100 ATSs and then print turn-by-turn driving directions. This process consumed weeks of working hours, was prone to errors and once completed, proved difficult to modify. In 2015, Elections turned to the Miami-Dade County’s Information Technology Department (ITD) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Solution Services group for assistance in automating this process. ITD developed the ATS Routing System (ARS). The system successfully leverages connections to Election databases, GIS tools, layers, and routing algorithms to automate the steps in the previous process, ensure data integrity, allow for last second adjustments and reduce weeks of labor to just a few hours.