Ballot Elections

BubbleScan is an outstanding solution for small to mid-size elections from a couple hundred to a couple thousand ballots. Our solution has been used successfully in church elections, officer elections  as well as delegate selections in associations and political parties. We also excel at promotional voting for products and services such as the wine tasting contest during Grapefest at Grapevine, TX or ‘The Best of the Twin Lakes’ conducted by The Baxter Bulletin in  Mountain Home, AR.

How does this work?

1. The starting point is your calling us to talk about your election project. We want to know things like the nature of the election, whether promotional (“Best of ….”) or for positions,  the number of candidates,  the number of voters, how long from the time the candidate list is finalized until the ballots have to be ready, how long from the time the ballots are collected until you want to announce the results, … All of this is  best discussed over the phone. It allows us to assess your project and prepare a quote.

2. All projects begin with the design of a custom election ballot, which contains the positions and candidates and your organization’s or event’s title and logo in an format that makes it readable by our BubbleScan2xls OMR Software.  Ballots can be single page, third-page, half-page, or multi-page.  Many officer and delegate elections can be accommodated with a third-page ballot, which is very cost-effective and scans well and fast. Whatever your requirements, we want to create a solution that works for you.

3. Our ballots can be printed on regular paper (we suggest 24 or 28lb paper as it holds up a little better) from your laser printer (ink jets won’t work, sorry) or copier. This makes it possible to print ballots on-site. For larger quantities it is often more cost-effective to print ballots ahead of time.  We will gladly provide you with a quote for printed ballots as well. When ballots need to be cut you want to make extra sure that your printer pays attention.  Poorly cut ballots will slow down the speed with which our software can read the images and can result in errors that require additional time for review and manual reentry. Please consider buying ballots from us, particularly when your ballots need to be cut.

4. Once filled in and collected, election ballots need to be scanned and processed. Usually this is done by you, our customer,  using your own document scanner or a rented scanner from us, and our BubbleScan2xls OMR Software, which you can rent for just the duration of your project or purchase. BubbleScan2xls drops data directly into a custom Excel spreadsheet. [By the way, the customization of the spreadsheet is part of the form design fee.]  Our spreadsheets utilize macros to perform the various data handling and report generation tasks. You initiate a macro task by clicking on a button. For instance, the button labeled “Review Data” will start a task that does exactly that, let you review the data.

5. All scanned and processed data needs to be reviewed. As much as we would like our solution to be 100% fool proof, it is not. There are generally two types of errors. The first type is an error detected by the BubbleScan2xls OMR Software and can be caused by a poorly printed (out of alignment) ballot, a poorly scanned ballot (specified the wrong page size, scanned image is too skewed (crooked), scanned upside-down, torn or bent corners, …). When the software reports such an error the Excel spreadsheet will not attempt to even show partial data, as there is no guarantee that the partial data is correct. Instead the spreadsheet displays such records as “error”. If you’ve scanned an entire batch upside down, we suggest you delete the errors from the spreadsheet and rescan. If the errorneous ballot is just a one-off, and that is usually the case, then your recourse is to manually enter the data directly into the spreadsheet. Our spreadsheet will make that a relatively painless undertaking by displaying the image of the ballot on the right side of your screen and positioning the cursor in the corresponding row in the RECORDS worksheet.

The second kind of error is one introduced by the voters. A thin line through the bubble will in all likelihood not be detected by the OMR software, nor will a circle around the bubble or a check mark next to the bubble.  Our spreadsheet can be configured to look for ballots that might fall into that category. We can either flag every position without a vote or flag ballots with fewer than X number of votes.

In addition, we always flag fields that have more than the allowed number of votes. That number is usually 1, but for delegate elections it is common that voters can vote for multiple candidates.  Our software cannot detect the difference between an erroneous  mark that was then crossed out (with a big, visible X) and a ‘normal’ mark. That is why the spreadsheet flags questionable votes and prompts for a manual review.

The review process is highly recommended and is a rather straight forward process. You click the ‘Review Data’ button to start the process. Our macro code then crawls through the records looking for highlighted fields. When it finds such a field it displays the image of the ballot on your screen and places the cursor in the field (Excel: cell) in question (or if the error is not field-specific, such as too few marks for the overall ballot, in the row for that record).

6. Last not least, you generate the report(s). Our spreadsheet comes with a standard tally report that is generated as you click the ‘Report’ button. Our macro code will then sum up all the votes for each candidate and display the totals and % figures in a sorted list.

 

If you have an event coming up and could benefit from our BubbleScan solution give us a call. Our objective is to create a custom solution that is easy to use, reliable, verifiable and affordable. We would love to hear from you, today.