For the past three years, SageSmith has been working with the City of New York on modernizing their election management systems. These systems include almost all processes leading up to the voting device and ballot printing, which feed back into systems for capturing the re-canvassing of results and production of documents for certification. The following is a list of modules developed by SageSmith that provide end-to-end processing and reporting capabilities:
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Calendar
The Calendar module captures key information in State Election Law statutes with any easy- to- follow data entry form. This information is converted into rules that are used to automatically generate dates to provide dynamic system work flows, reporting and on-screen checks and balances. Rules capture is presented in an intuitive fashion that makes maintaining legislative changes straightforward and efficient for the user. Federal Holidays are also taken into account so that producing an accurate annual calendar of filing, cutoff and election dates literally takes seconds. Other non-federal and religious holidays can be entered so that the system can highlight any potential conflicts.
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Election Setup
The Election Setup module captures public offices, party positions, numbers to be elected, parties and independent bodies and ballot proposals. All of this information is kept year-to-year along with rules determining frequency so that the system does most of the "heavy lifting" for setting up elections after initial data entry and review.
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Domain
The Domain module is flexible enough to take many popular GIS file formats in bulk to construct subdivision information for both political and geographic boundaries. Custom Web Services are used to link third party systems for online GEO-coding support to track every address entered into the system to the census tract census block level. This level of granularity allows political subdivision changes to take place without ever having to "re-sync" any data in the system that contains address information. Additional language requirements are tracked in this module along with key census data.
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Facility
The Facility module captures all facility information including polling sites, training sites for workers, warehouse facilities for voting machines, and election headquarters. Building layout information and schematic documents are indexed to each record, ensuring that election officials can make better decisions concerning the facility's accessibility to all voters. Voting district moves, combines and splits are all easily managed and manipulated through this system with information such as registration totals, subdivision makeup, worker requirements and available square footage guiding the process.
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Poll Worker
The Poll Worker module captures all application information for Election Day workers. Using address information as well as fields identifying position preference and party affiliation, assignments are suggested by the system to fill classes and Election Day vacancies. An extensive bar code scanning solution is available (though not required) to track a worker's renewal for the election year, class assignment and attendance, as well as Election Day assignment and attendance. Multiple address information is made available so that workers are reachable year after year and checks are delivered on time to those that head south for the winter after the election season.
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Candidate
Candidate is a document-centric module that strives to capture one name, one time so that the record can be recalled for many different candidacies and for many different events. All candidate correspondence is identified and generated by the system using the Calendar module along with rules correlating to specific documents that are filed. A bar coding system is used to easily record and track all petition documents associated with a candidacy record. Substitutions, objections, court challenges, candidate history, ballot status rulings, and financials are all either captured and/or viewable in this module.
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Financial Filing
The Financial Filing module captures all treasurer information, filings and delinquencies associated with political committees, PACs and candidates filers. Leveraging the Calendar and Candidate modules, much of the work to find delinquent filings as well as candidates without a committee, is done entirely by the system. All legal enforcement actions and documents are captured and generated out of this module.
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Ballot
The Ballot module brings together Calendar, Domain, Setup and Candidate module information to give ballot information to third party systems. With ballot configurations changing sometimes days and even hours before an election event, this module provides many point and click features to confidently configure and export key ballot data for print vendors and/or machine ballots.
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Results
The Results module assists with election night importing or entry of results through certification. A sophisticated re-canvassing feature gives election officials a data entry screen that closely mimics the look of the actual ballot. Locking features, by contest (in case court rulings delay work on particular races), as well as extensive activity logging and reporting make reviewing results for even the most complex elections simple.
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Office Holder
The Office Holder module is automatically populated after winners are declared or uncontested party positions are certified in the Results module. It also allows for entry of vacancies and vacancy-fillers through non-event means. This feature generates a wealth of information for historical purposes as well as providing political parties with meeting rosters and mailing labels.
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Reports
With an available list of 250 reports system-wide that is growing by the day, there is almost nothing an authorized end user can't request in a moment’s notice. All reports have export options in many popular file formats including PDF, RTF (Word) and Excel. The Excel option gives more sophisticated users the freedom to manipulate format, graphing, sorting and grouping options in the rare occasion that there is not a pre-packaged report available to meet their specific needs.
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Security
Few things are as critical to a democratic society as the integrity of its election systems. For this reason, security is the most important, as well as the most heavily-scrutinized component of the S-Elect system. As is the case with any secure system, multiple layers of security are embedded within each component of the software and database. Application layer security is easily managed by election officials and is specifically tailored for multiple levels and parties involved in performing the most critical transactions.
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Voting Machine (currently in development)
The Voting Machine module will track all information on the fleet of voting systems used to conduct elections. Specific functions such as machine cataloging, preventive maintenance capture, and chain-of-custody tracking will be some of the noteworthy features available.