Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
The client: The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is responsible for carrying out elections within Cuyahoga County, including registering candidates, providing polling places, and tabulating and publishing results.
The challenge: Publication of election results promptly after they are tabulated is a critical function of the board of elections. Due to the massive interest of local, state and national media in Cuyahoga County election results, the Board had experienced delays in making results available online because the existing Board Web site was unable to handle the traffic it experienced on election night.
The updated site needed to:
- Be mobile-friendly so that users could access information in their phones or tablet devices
- Help citizens vote by providing information on voter registration, directions to polling places, sample allots and absentee ballot tracking.
- Allow for seamless publication of results as soon as they were tabulated.
- Let users customize results pages so that they can follow only races they are interested in.
- Provide self-service solutions for candidates, including download of custom lists of polling locations, districts, and other legally mandated information.
- Help with recruiting and training poll workers through online applications and training.
The solution: iData worked with staff of the Cuyahoga County Department of IT to develop a responsive, mobile friendly site that met all of these requirements, including a “my registration” portal which allows voters to check their registration, find their polling place, view their ballots and confirm their participation history. Recent updates were able to increase the load that the results pages could handle by more than 3,000% by replacing server side code with client-side knockout JavaScript and Web services. The update site includes functionality to support:
Event calendars and registration for candidates and voters
- Pollworker online application and post-election feedback
- Am I Registered? – Allows people to look up their voter registration information by Last Name and Birthdate.
- Where Do I Vote – Allows people to find their polling location by entering an address
- Ballot Search – Allows people to view sample ballots by entering City, Ward, Precinct and Party information.
- Vote By Mail Labels – Allows people to extract “Vote By Mail” registration data in PDF (Avery 5160 label) or Excel format.
- Vote By Mail Returns – Allows people to extract “Vote By Mail” return data
- Voter Registration – Allows people to print an “Vote By Mail” voter registration form with pre-filled data.
- Track My Ballot – Allows “Vote By Mail” voters to track the status of their ballot
- Campaign Finance Reports – Allows people to view candidates’ Campaign Finance Reports
- Street Range Guide – Allows people to print a Street Range Guide Report by specifying a political division
- Current Elections Results – Allows people to view election results as they are being tallied on election night.