a. Elections update - Laserfiche WebLink

Election Update As we get ready for elections this year almost everything is changed. The passage of the HA V A legislation in late 2002 has put us on the fast track with election updates. Cass County had started the switch to the new equipment prior to the passing ofHA V A so we are ahead of the game as far as knowing the equipment - both by our staff and some of the election boards. The state has accepted the bid of Election Systems and Software for the statewide uniform voting systems. The system will consist of one scanner per precinct and one accessible voting device per precinct. As part of this process we set a statewide goal of reducing the number of precincts from the 666 used in 2002 to 525. This reduction of precincts was for the purpose of making sure the federal funds covered most of the cost of the HA V A implementation. Federal funds are covering 95% of the equipment costs, state funds are covering 2.5% and county funds the other 2.5%. How does this all affect Cass County? First of all, we had already purchased 32 scanners over the past few years. We will get reimbursed 97.5% of those costs. Since we cost shared those purchases with the City of Fargo and the City of West I assume we will make some arrangement to refund the cities part of the costs they paid for the equipment purchases. The payment from the federal funds should be about $150,000. Second, we took delivery on 35 additional scanners last week. We will get billed for 2.5% of the purchase price or approximately $4,500. Another good note is that we hopefully will receive $10,000 on the trade in of our two high speed central count machines. Assessable voting machines will not be used in Cass County until 2006. We are not sure what equipment we will be getting as the technology is changing fast. Pushing the purchase out the two years gives us a better chance of getting equipment that will serve the needs of the people with disabilities while at the same time ensuring the integrity of the voting process and reporting systems. Any equipment purchased will have to integrate with the scanners. With this equipment there are some storage and movement problems. We are using the old district court offices on the second floor and with 67 scanners, ballot boxes, and other supplies space is becoming a problem, but is manageable at this point. We will need to move some of this equipment to the Fargo Civic Center for poll worker training and out to the polling sites for election. After the election we will need to bring the equipment back to the courthouse after the election. As our office really doesn't have the equipment or manpower to move this equipment we will be contracting with a moving company for the deliveries and pickups. Weare also using new software this year that will allow us to enter candidates and measures on line with ESS in Omaha. Earlier we built the district data on the system, with the addition of the candidates and measures we can then create the ballot. While we have 59 precincts, with the different cities and school boundaries, we have 109 ballot combinations. Some precincts will have up to 6 ballot types, as an example the Riverview precinct would have the following ballot combinations: State, County, Fargo, Fargo School District State, County, Frontier, Fargo School District State, County, Briarwood, Fargo School District State, County, no city, Fargo School District State, County, no city, West Fargo School District The new software will produce PDF's to send directly to the printer for typesetting and printing. Hopefully this will speed up the turnaround time on the printing process. The same data entry used for the ballot printing will also be used on the programming and reporting sides so will have less data entry and proofing. This software is all new so there have been a few problems with the data entry but hopefully this will all be resolved early this week.