Registrars of Voters maintain voter records, including registration applications, signature verification, jurisdiction address, and last activity. Keeping voter registration rolls accurate and current is an important part of holding efficient and secure elections.
Registrars of Voters are tasked with:
- Protecting against fraud.
- Accurate budgets for ballots, voting machines, polling places and poll workers.
- Efficiently running the polls on voting day(s).
There are several ways a voter’s registration may become inaccurate or ineligible.
Among them:
- Moves to a different jurisdiction or out of country
- Criminal convictions
- Mental incompetence
- Death
It’s rare that people remember to contact the Registrar of Voters with these life changes.
Election officials need systems in place to keep track of these changes, as well as others that may render a registered voter ineligible.
Fortunately, applications developed for, primarily, the financial industry can be used to help the ROV maintain the voter rolls in a more automated, transparent process. The technology used in the financial industry to protect against false positives can now be economically applied to ballot signature verification, whether the signature is scanned paper or originated digitally.
Using a 6-Sigma approach to determine a signature’s authenticity can be done at various points in the registration process. Intelligent Character Recognition in Parascript on scanned ballots is the first “set of eyes”. Confidence levels are set to the comfort level of the Registrar and certain fields are set to always be confirmed by a human in the process. Using Parascript ensures that each ballot is processed the same way, every time, with compliance reporting as a standard business practice.
At the time of signature verification in Parascript, in addition to signature verification against registration applications, the “from address” is compared to the USPS current mailing address to ensure the voter is still eligible to vote based on location. In the same pass, the address and signature on the ballot can be compared to both your database of record and the DMV’s.
Also, in that same process, a search of death certificates by name and last known address will flag if the name and address are found in a death record, as an exception to be reviewed and for the person to be removed from the voter rolls after review and approval by the human in the process. YOU don’t have to search the death records; the application will do it for you as you scan that returned ballot!
Interested in learning how to evolve this tedious, manual and error prone process into an automated review and escalation of exceptions solution? Western Integrated Systems has the technical, business related and compliance experience to provide a solution custom tailored solution, based on your requirements.
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