Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page 45)

voting standards statewide. The voter-registration database (VRDB) and accompanying county election-management systems were Washington’s answer to these mandates. Washington state officials decided they could meet these requirements by creating a comprehensive VRDB designed to interact with county election-management systems and the equipment they used to record votes at the county level. The state partnered with Microsoft, which supplied tools — including of Feb. 1, 2006, 3,387 duplicate registrations and 5,244 registrations of deceased citizens were investigated and canceled because of the system. The VRDB checks its data against records from the state’s Department of Licensing to help verify who’s eligible to vote. The system also removes felons and the deceased from the eligible voter list, which requires the VRDB to work with the state’s Department of Corrections, Department of Health and the Social Security Death Index. The database’s ability to weed out ineligible voters will be useful when verifying votes from people MyVote lets citizens check and change pertinent voting information and even see maps to ballot drop boxes nearby. Users can make address changes, view election candidate statements and photos, and register to vote in English or Spanish. Microsoft.NET, BizTalk and SQL Server — to build the VRDB in-house. It was operating by Jan. 1, 2006, the deadline to meet HAVA requirements. “As we met with various election software vendors, we came to the realization there’s really no such thing as out of the box because every software solution needs to be customized to meet each state’s laws, regulations and court mandates,” said Steve Excell, the assistant secretary of state. Washington needed a customizable solution, a standard, rigid solution wouldn’t cut it. “Their products were not extensible, and we were looking at giving voters access to information like their voting history, polling places, ballot drop boxes and customized information that you could get on the Internet.” In IT circles, an extensible system is one that’s flexible and can adapt to specialized needs. Washington also wanted greater control over how the state’s VRDB would communicate with all 39 counties. When the database was created, all county voter registration lists were consolidated into the one the VRDB now contains. The reasoning was that one list would improve election accuracy and reduce voter fraud. It turned out they were right. As who cast provisional ballots — a HAVA requirement. A provisional ballot lets voters cast a ballot even when county officials are unsure they’re registered voters. The provisional ballot also comes into play when voters forget their photo identification or other credentials, required by the counties. The state required counties to have vendor-supported election-management software, which had to interface with major enterprise-scale databases like Microsoft SQL or Oracle. These election-management systems receive votes electronically, and they also, per HAVA, give voters the option to review their votes before finalizing them in case there’s a mistake. Voter information is sent from counties to the state database on the back end through Web services. “Now all this interaction between the county and state system is in near real time. It’s not exactly 100 percent real time because there is a slight delay within reason, from a few seconds to possibly a few minutes,” said Don Quach, the Washington Election Information Project and VRDB technical manager. “The main reason we did this is because we wanted to be able to keep the system and the communication reliable and allow for the system to process the large amount of transactions that potentially could be coming from all 39 counties within the state,” Quach said. Allowing the counties to retain some control over how they receive votes, makes complying with HAVA simpler for Washington. “From my perspective, a lot of other states chose to have a big-bang, centrally Flexibility and Control Washington wanted counties to have flexibility when handling ballots. It was up to each county — to a point — to decide what type of machines and systems to use to record and count votes. Counties had a choice of four vendors. “We elected to build our own system — our own voter-registration database — for several reasons. We’ve long since concluded that data’s data — it’s extensible,” Excell said. “Web services permit interoperability, so our counties can keep their existing election-management systems. We didn’t have to take 39 counties and convert them to one new system. In fact, we told the counties they had only two requirements to meet.” administrated state solution that didn’t work because it didn’t fit with what the counties needed — each county having a different requirement set,” said Ron O’Neil, a Microsoft senior architect. “If you have 10 million people in your county, you’re really quite different than if you have just a half a million people in your county, and so it’s 45 http://www.Microsoft.NET http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.