2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	Vote-By-Mail Maricopa County Phoenix, AZ USA Year: 2000 Status: Laureate Category: Government & Non-Profit Organizations Nominating Company: Dell Computer Corporation
	America's 5th largest county encourages voters to request mail-in ballots by phone, mail, internet, or walk-in, increasing overall voter participation as mail-in ballots grow to account for a third of the total.
	Maricopa County has created and maintained a state of the art system for conducting the Vote-By-Mail process. Built into this vote-technology is the ability to access the voter registration database established by the county, to research a voter requesting an early ballot whether it be a request made by phone, internet, mail or walk-in, ascertain their qualification status, determine the type of ballot necessary and set a code on that voters record that signals a mailer packet to be generated - all in one step (See attachment A - screen shots). All of this coupled with other technology features such as bar-coding, enable our department to efficiently and accurately track, process and return the voters ballot thus keeping in line with our department's mission and vision to serve the ever-growing voter population base. To get a clear idea of the enormous task that the conducts of elections present, a brief description is required as to the inner workings of the elections department. Maricopa County Elections Department, by mandate of the laws of Arizona, conducts elections, registers voters, and maintains voter records for over 1,400,000 voters, for Maricopa County and all of its municipalities. In addition, Maricopa County Elections Department: * Qualifies County candidates for office; * Designates precinct boundaries; * Selects polling places; * Appoints, and instructs, election boards; * Tabulates voted ballots, and publishes results; * Serves on the County Canvassing Board; * Provides statistics and results for election analysis; * Maintains candidates' campaign reports; * Maintains financial disclosures as public records; * Conducts All aspects of Vote-By-Mail to include Counter Voting, Satellite Voting, Special Election Board (SEB) Voting, All Mail Ballot Elections, etc. Many tasks go into running an election. Before the election date boundaries must be drawn dividing precincts, voters must be registered, candidates and initiatives must be filed and placed on the ballot, campaign information must be monitored and voting information supplied, early ballots and counter voting must be established and conducted. On the election date, the ballots must be cast then tallied. The election results must then be certified and released. Computers are being used in all of these tasks, but it is their use in the Vote-By-Mail process that has made the greatest impact. Of all these functions, the Vote-By-Mail process has seen the largest statistical increase in participation. Within the past 9 years Maricopa County and all of its municipalities have witnessed the response and voter acceptance of this process. This growth in part has much to do with the Arizona State Legislature revising after 1990, the Vote-By-Mail statutes, which at that time was referred to as "Absentee Voting." Under previous legislation a voter could only request a ballot via the mail if they where going to be out of the jurisdiction on election day and thus unable to go to the polling place, hence the term "Absentee Voting." This of course had no benefit or convenience to the average voter who was bound to participation by way of the polling place method. With the above-mentioned statutory change, the Vote-By-Mail process was opened up to all registered voters and no longer required the voter to have a reason or justification to vote early. With this revision in place Maricopa County saw an overwhelming increase in this method of voting. The following are a few statistics from Maricopa County's General Elections that reflect the upsurge in voter participation since the statutory changes took effect in regards to Vote-By-Mail (VBM). Also included is a more detailed statistical election report (See attachment B). YEAR REG TOTAL TOTAL BALLOTS CAST VBM REQUESTS VBM RETURNS VBM % OF BALLOTS CAST 1990 1026884 640847 not available 20968 3.3% 1992 1169211 890680 87380 69817 7.8% 1994 1339527 655732 101676 81706 12.5% 1996 1310392 825217 232001 186392 22.6% 1998 1348213 586090 231405 195141 33.3% Keeping with the accelerated participation trend in this process, Maricopa County was burdened with the dilemma of how to facilitate the mounting increase. Solution: The task before our department was to produce code and create a proprietary program that would allow us to accommodate the volume of Vote-By-Mail requests. In addition, the Vote-By-Mail process has tight timeframes that are mandated by law, such as requiring our department upon receipt of a request to fulfill said request within 48 hours. This in itself is a insurmountable task considering the number of registered voters in Maricopa County and the potential to have over 15,000 to 20,000 requests dropped off within one day. Compound this with that same volume hitting the following day. This task was met through the implementation of several new technologies. The change from a traditional mainframe based operating system to a client / server environment was perhaps the most significant change that aided in the processing of Vote-By-Mail ballots. Along with the move to a client / server operating system Maricopa County completely rewrote all of the Voter Registration Automation System (VRAS) software to take better advantage of the rapid increase in hardware technology and the wide spread use of the Internet. VRAS had gone on-line in 1992 and was still a very reliable and successful system of programs for all of Maricopa County's voter registration and election needs, however in just 4 years the technology to run these applications on a P.C. based network of workstations had been developed. Maricopa County took full advantage of these technologies and spent the next 2 years building and developing the new VRAS system. In the spring of 1998 all Vote-By-Mail election processing was now being accomplished on the new VRAS system, and the rest of the conversion took place 1 year later. The bottleneck in processing Vote-By-Mail ballots in the past was the affidavit storage and access system, an optical disk based unit holding 12 million image files spread across several optical platters. The time it took to access an individual affidavit ranged from 30 seconds to two minutes. By the fall of 1998 a new P.C. based unit was being used with a 1-terrabyte storage array to offload most of the public records from the old optical disk system. The time to access an archived voter registration affidavit from any workstation on the network immediately improved to less than a second, that meant one election worker could realistically process hundreds of ballots per hour instead of just a handful. The flexibility of this new VRAS system allows us to run several of the applications from any Internet browser, thus giving the public easier access to election information. For example anyone with a home computer and access to the Internet can find out pertinent election information such as: requesting a Vote-By-Mail ballot, election day polling places, Early Voting satellite voting sites, and even election night results. This flexibility also helps elections staff to perform more efficiently by allowing virtually any workstation on the network to perform any and all applications necessary to process Vote-By-Mail requests and return ballots. Once a voter's record has been flagged for a Vote-By-Mail ballot election staff can print the corresponding ballot envelope, complete with affidavit printed on the inside return envelope. These ballot envelopes or packets are printed in-house on 2 high speed impact printers so after a day of entering voter requests the election's staff can then print the packets, insert ballot and instructions in each and mail by the end of the business day. Each packet has the information necessary for staff to pull the correct ballot, and also has a bar code representing that voter's registration affidavit number. When a Vote-By-Mail ballot is returned to our office, the staff can now quickly check the voter's signature and set the voter's record as having voted by scanning the bar code on the return envelope. Scanning the bar code on the envelope brings up the archived image of the voter's registration form with their signature, if the 2 signatures match the worker then continues to the next envelope and the system will flag the voter's record as voted. With the affordability and availability of bar code scanners this easily makes any workstation available for the purpose of returning and checking signatures on Vote-By-Mail ballots for those times of high volume processing. The change in voting equipment technology has made voting more "user friendly" for the Vote-By-Mail voter as well as the polling place voter. Maricopa County now uses a voting system that utilizes precinct level optical scan readers at the polling places and central count readers to tabulate the Vote-By-Mail ballots. With the optical scan ballots the candidates and issues are printed on the ballot card so the voter can be assured that he has marked his ballot correctly. Maricopa County also uses leading edge printing technology at Early Voting Satellite sites across the county. A voter may enter any Early Voting Satellite site (Maricopa County had 11 satellite sites in 1998) and vote his or her applicable ballot. Each site has a network workstation that is on-line to retrieve and update a voter's record. The workstation also has the software that can produce all of the ballot styles applicable to the election along with a specially prepared laser printer that is able to print on ballot card stock. This workstation makes the site able to vote any individual and to print out any one of the possible 5000 ballot styles.
	The Vote-By-Mail process has many facets and benefits that include the following: ease and convenience, more time to study issues or candidates appearing on the ballot, relief from time constraint problems on election day such as conflicting job hours or transportation issues. The most evident benefit visible in past statistics is the overwhelming increase in voter turnout. In turn, the vote-technology and process we have created has greatly assisted us in reaching and maintaining compliance with the above mentioned timeframes. There are many other benefits realized that relate not only to the voters but the political parties, candidates and ultimately our State and country as well. Conceptually, Vote-By-Mail is geared towards providing alternative methods of voting for the public to increase participation, reduce voter apathy and thwart the stereotype that government is antiquated and inflexible. By providing such a convenient mechanism to allow the voters to exercise their right, Maricopa County has realized an ever-growing surge in the Vote-By-Mail process. According to various studies and research it has shown that this process has slightly changed the demographics of the traditional voters. We are seeing a sharp increase in participation of: younger voters; voters likely to have moved in the past two years; students; elderly; and individuals with physical limitations. With Maricopa County being the 5th largest county in the United States it is fair to say that our success with our vote-technology and Vote-By-Mail process has placed at the leading edge of our field. The process and technology has fundamentally changed how tasks are performed. A once tedious, cumbersome and time consuming duty has now become a uncomplicated, efficient, accurate and safe process that has benefits that are far reaching to a wide spectrum of people. In addition to our staff benefiting from a process that is well defined and stress free, the voters benefit. The voter now has, which is sometimes rare with government mandates, the freedom to choose, either traditional voting at the polling place or Vote-By-Mail. Moreover, the taxpayer benefits from the saved revenues recouped from unspent overtime and other expenses generated using an out-dated process and archaic technology. All of this courtesy of the innovative strides our department has taken to offer impeccable service through the implementation of new-technologies, ideologies and a vision of the future.
	By the very nature of their work, election officials lend themselves to computerization. All the items that pass through an election office - names of registered voters, residential addresses, candidate names, district numbers, precinct numbers, votes cast, etc. - are discrete pieces of information which can and usually must be counted, stored and later recalled. Because computers do that sort of thing very well, it was inevitable that election officials would adopt this new technology. - The Federal Election Commission publication Computerizing Election Administration Computers were first used in the voting process in 1964, when five counties in the United States made use of them in the November election. Since then, their presence has grown, by 1988 31% of the counties in America were using computer systems to count 55% of the popular vote. By 1992 two-thirds of American voters were using computerized systems to cast their ballots. The importance of information technology in this process is crucial. It not only provided us a tool to allow us to research, flag a voters record and print them a packet within a mandated deadline, moreover, it provided an uncomplicated answer to the security needs generated by the Vote-By-Mail process. Deborah Phillips, President of VIP (Voting Integrity Project, Inc.), a national election integrity watchdog organization, stated that "absentee (Vote-By-Mail) ballot fraud is a real and growing threat without proper security programs in place." This is why Maricopa County Elections Department has taken this technology one step further. Not only must the requestor of an early ballot be established on the voter registration system prior to receiving a packet, but they must also maintain their registration throughout the 33-day early voting period. This eliminates the potential to receive ballots from voters, who have requested an early ballot and subsequently lost their eligibility to vote (i.e. moved out of the county or municipality, convicted of a felony, etc.). In examining breakdowns in election security one must also look at the possibility for human error. To overcome this possibility Maricopa County has created our vote-technology system & computer programs for conducting the Vote-By-Mail process. Built into this vote-technology is the ability to access the voter registration database established by the county, to research a voter requesting an early ballot whether it be a request made by phone, internet, mail or walk-in. This in itself assures that the voter is a qualified elector for the election they wish to cast a vote. Moreover, through the implementation of new vote-technology, our department has also created an early ballot returning system that allows us to scan the voter affidavit envelope, which contains the voter's early ballot, thus enabling us to access an image of the voter's original affidavit completed at registration (See attachment C). This enables us to perform a signature verification to ensure that the voter requesting was indeed the voter that received and returned the ballot and not a fraudulent recipient. Available within this same computerized process, is the ability to set a return status flag on the voter's record. This status flag is another safeguard that protects against the possibility of a voter returning more than one ballot, requesting another ballot, or voting another ballot in person or at the polling place. Once this flag has been set the system does not allow issuance of another ballot. To further guard against a fraudulent request, Maricopa County Elections Department does not accept any request via the telephone or internet that is solicitation for a ballot to be mailed to an address that is not reflected on the main voter registration database. This prevents individuals from requesting someone else's ballot to their address in the attempt to defraud the department. To accommodate voters who do wish to have a ballot mailed to an address other than that which appears on their record, a written request is required, accompanied with the requestor's signature for verification purposes. The innovative technology, systems and programs in place by our department allow us to once again succeed with our Vote-By-Mail endeavors. In utilizing the new vote-technology available and designed by our department, Maricopa County is profoundly secure in its Early Voting process and its ability to conduct this task efficiently, accurately and safely. With all of the safeguards built into the system such as: signature verification on all returned early ballots; stringent request requirements; systematic record keeping; and tracking, the negative shadow surrounding the early voting process should soon be lifted to unveil a secure and fraudulent free method of providing the ability to the voter to exercise their right - the right to vote.
	Vote-By-Mail has the potential for a positive impact on society as a whole. With the technologies in use, a secure and efficient system has been created to offer the public the option of how they will voice their vote. The concept of better government is not original, but Maricopa County Elections has set the standard in the field of elections. Our process coupled with technology has enabled over 30% of the voters who cast a ballot to do so from the convenience and freedom of their homes. We are estimating this percentage to increase up to 40% for the year 2000 elections to potentially having all of the participants in a major election voting through the Vote-By-Mail process by the year 2005.The Vote-By-Mail process began its evolution in 1991 with the legislative changes made to the State of Arizona's "Absentee Voting" law. By opening up the process to all voters and removing it's limitations a new horizon has been set as a standard for conducting elections. Maricopa County has meet the challenges head on and will continue to evolve its technology to accommodate the voter turnout increase of an ever-growing voter population base.The ultimate goal of the Maricopa County Elections Department is to provide all voters the ability to be heard. To break the barriers and constraints that sometimes result in voter apathy towards the process. To reach a 100% turnout is a lofty goal, but one we are confident can be reached through the Vote-By-Mail process. There is only one way to handle such an enormous turnout, Maricopa County will have to continue to lead the way towards advanced technologies and program creations that will handle the volume, but still provide the assurance of quality, security and simplicity. We are once again confident that this to is also an attainable destiny and our absolute objective.
	The Vote-By-Mail process has achieved and to an extent exceeded its goal by providing a wide variety of the voters, coming from varying demographics, the opportunity to exercise their right to vote - all within an efficient timeframe and secure environment. The fallout in voter turnout normally came from younger voters; voters likely to have moved in the past two years; students; elderly; and individuals with physical limitations. This process has opened back up the election to these individuals by removing the constraints and limitations that might have once kept them from participation. Whether it was time constraints or physical limitations, this new Vote-By-Mail process has revitalized the election process and has truly made the vote a voice of the majority. This process is fully operational and the technology driving it, although continually upgrading designs and features, continues to surpass our expectations. We are preparing to gear up for the year 2000 elections and expect to see our programs and processes put to the ultimate test. The voters constantly make us aware as to how convenient and simple the process is. Through the use of the Internet, voters can make a request for a ballot to be mailed to them (See attachment D - screen shot). This in itself has received most of the feedback from voters as to government working to make itself accessible to its constituents. An example of one of the comments we received about our program comes from Lloyd Petis of Scottsdale, Arizona who writes "I appreciate this service, I am handicapped and it is difficult for me to get out and about. This allows me the opportunity to vote and I appreciate you department providing this to all of us in this type of situation." We have not only heard positive feedback from the voters but from the municipalities that we conduct their elections for as well. For example the City Clerk for the City of Tempe, Randy Gross, responded to us in a very complimentary letter relating his appreciation for the service provided. More particularly, relating to the overwhelming response his office received from the public in regards to the Vote-By-Mail campaign. Vote-By-Mail has been enthusiastically accepted by a majority of the community. In recent polls over 75% prefer the Vote-By-Mail process where as 8% had no preference and the remainder preferred the traditional polling place method. 75% is an overwhelming number to contend with in Maricopa County, due to its growing voter population, which is at 1,400,000 presently. For us to continue to be successful we are reliant on vote-technology to continue to improve within our department and we are confident that we have begun the journey towards success and taken the necessary steps in the right direction.
	Maricopa County has faced various obstacles, much like any other service-oriented agency providing a valuable commodity to the public, and the right to vote is one of our most precious commodities. The most challenging obstacle we had to overcome was in convincing the public, political parties and candidates of the validity and security of the Vote-By-Mail process. To quote an old saying, "If it isn't broken, why fix it." This mindset was prevalent on many of the individuals involved. It was our task to convince them, not through words but through results. Since the evolved concept of Vote-By-Mail first began we have seen exactly that, results. Turnouts have increased by over 400% in comparison to 1990's participation numbers and today's numbers. These statistics are hard to ignore and even harder to deny by opponents of this process. The only debatable obstacle that existed was the potential for fraud. This was addressed by utilizing the new vote-technology made available and designed by our department. Many safeguards built into the system such as: signature verification on all returned early ballots; stringent request requirements; systematic record keeping; and tracking. All of which have proven to be an effective method of safeguarding the ballot and its voter. The use of computers and the adherent nature of computers to handle these responsibilities with diligence, is what has brought us to the point of acceptance with any and all who might challenge the process. We our continuing to make improvements such as asking the candidates, who are doing mass mailings, to barcode there pre-printed cards with the voters ID number so that we scan these cards when received. This would allow us to eliminate any keying to access the voter's record and thus automate the process of queuing the flag on the voter's record to print a mailer packet. There are many more innovations planned for the future, all of which are reliant on the new technologies at hand and those to come in our future. Maricopa County Recorder/Elections Department stands proud of its creative strides to place the voters at the forefront of a new era and we are confident in our abilities to meet any other challenges or difficulties that might befall us. This of course is in part to our ideology that "It might not be broken, but it can be made better." Though the use of advanced technologies, we offer to the voters of our county not only a simple method, but a safe, secure way of sounding that voice that loudly speaks in the tone of a Vote.