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Technology: In the
Spotlight and Behind the Scenes of the November 5th Election
All eyes were on
Miami-Dade County’s new touch screen voting machines that
performed up to par on November 5th. Not so well known is the
technology that was in play behind the scenes in the weeks
leading up to Election Day.
The scheduling of people proved to be a major challenge for Jane
Feuer, Assistant Director of the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD),
and the person assigned to handle staffing allocation and
payroll for the November 5 election. With just over a month to
prepare, she was tasked to assign thousands of county employees
and poll workers to over 500 polling locations, taking into
account many factors including training, availability, skills
and expertise.
Over a long weekend, a team of eGovernment experts was assembled
to help her out. A plan was drawn to extract employee
information from the payroll files, merge this information with
pollworker information kept in elections, and create an
assignment database that could be used to track assignments and
payroll for employees and pollworkers.
The ‘Election
Resource Assignment’ database used the power of the web to
provide employees with up to the minute Election Day assignments
including their role, the precinct location and the names of
other personnel assigned to that precinct. Departmental
management was able to submit staff excusal requests, and review
and monitor departmental staffing assignments as they were made.
Feuer and her elections staffing team were able to assign
precinct staff and monitor staffing overages and shortages as
changes were made.
Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) technology was used to match employee
addresses with polling locations and place them as close to
their homes as possible. Elections timesheets, data entry and
reports were incorporated into the database to insure that
payroll records for pollworkers and County employees would
reflect the correct hours worked for the elections. Within days,
the system was designed and operational, and during the course
of the elections planning process, the system received over one
million hits!
Added to this was an informational website that was designed to
inform county employees of important information related to the
elections process. Many questions were posed regarding Election
Day preparations, parking, food, compensation, etc., and the
information was updated many times a day. Without the website,
there was no way to ensure that a consistent message reached
everyone.
On Election Day, attention shifted to the ‘map’, a third
component of technology dubbed the ‘In Command” system. Again
using GIS technology, In Command was developed to track polling
places and precincts through various statuses during the
Election.
As each polling
location was successfully opened at 7 a.m., a computerized map
of county precincts turned from white to green. This reporting
of status in real time across more than 750 precincts was no
small feat.
Arrangements were
made with Nextel to provide the Quality Assurance (QA) managers
with instant two-way messaging telephones to automatically
update precinct statuses. Just before 7 a.m., a text message was
sent out to all QA managers, asking them to press a button on
their phone when they had successfully opened their location.
This action triggered a message, delivered over the Nextel
wireless network, received by the county’s email system and
automatically posted to the GIS which controlled the coloring of
map.
Had any problems
been encountered, the polling location would have reported a
status that would reflect a yellow or red shading; but by 7:30
a.m., the map was green, showing that all precincts were open.
The same type of process occurred at 7 p.m. to handle the
closing of polls.
Another essential element in success was teaching voters how to
use the iVotronics voting machines. An animated tutorial to do
just that was used extensively by community outreach staff at
MDPD and Elections. Using Flash technology, the voter was guided
through a virtual tour of an iVotronics machine, and then
invited to select “a hand of their choice” to
try out the touch
screen voting!
“Miami Dade County is extraordinarily fortunate to have such
dedicated and talented technology experts”, remarked Feuer as
she reflected on the accomplishments achieved under such short
time constraints and intense national scrutiny. “There is no
doubt that technology played a critical role in the success of
these elections.”
Special thanks to the key players that made this technology
happen!
Jay Alvarez de la
Campa
Kay Smith
Osvaldo Navarette
William Riera
Martha Guerra
Clare Sibori
Julian Albo, Sr
Julian Albo, Jr
Darlene Fox
Assia Alexandrova
Robert Gilbert
Loretta Cronk
Jose Nodarse
Karen Mussoline
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