EXPRESSPOLL® And CENTRALPOINT® Help Election Officials Stat In The Know On Election Day
As an election administrator, would you like to see the exact moment your polls are up and running? Would knowing how many voters are at a particular location help you allocate the right amount of resources? Or would you like to have more time to focus on your job, by simplifying the process of sharing election results with the media?
If any of these scenarios bring up not so fond memories of elections past; ES&S can help you proactively manage your future elections with CentralPoint®, an election monitoring software. It receives real-time information from the ExpressPoll®, an electronic pollbook, to populate charts, graphs and maps on an easily monitored dashboard display. This can be accessed from any internet connected device, allowing you to manage your poll place from anywhere during both Early Voting and on Election Day.
Read about one election official’s thoughts on CentralPoint after a trial run during Cass County, N.D.’s April 28 city election in the below excerpt from Inforum.
In Cass County, election officials now know more about voters
By Tu-Uyen Tran | Inforum | Fargo, North Dakota
May 6, 2015 at 8:34 p.m.
FARGO—If they wanted to, Cass County election officials could have figured out how many 20-somethings in the precinct closest to the university voted every minute that polls were open during the recent city election. Poll-book software the county is testing gave officials unprecedented access to information that previously would have taken a lot of time to manually tabulate from state and county databases.
Knowing how many people voted at which polling station helps ensure elections go smoothly, said county Auditor Mike Montplaisir. “We could see when people are voting, and we can build in alerts,” he said. “If we send out 1,000 ballots to a precinct and we see 800 people voted there, we may need to send more ballots out.”
More broadly though, he said, the data helps voters and candidates. “We think this can be a good educational tool for the voters. If you’re complaining because your candidate doesn’t get elected, look at the demographics of who’s voting. Maybe they need to concentrate their education efforts.”
During the April 28 city election, data show the largest number of voters came from Fargo’s south side. Those at the tail end of their working years voted more than other age groups, while college-age people hardly voted at all.
The beauty of the new software system, called CentralPoint, is it allows election officials like Montplaisir and DeAnn Buckhouse, Cass County’s election coordinator, to track the information in real time from desktop computers or tablets.
They said the system could eventually be set up to give news media access to similar data. Montplaisir said TV stations are especially keen to find out which polling stations are busiest.
Full article available here: https://www.inforum.com/news/3739308-cass-county-election-officials-now-know-more-about-voters