a. Elections update - Laserfiche WebLink

Along with the new equipment this year there are other changes for this year, the reduction in precincts, changes in city boundaries, and a new identification requirement for voters. The change in precincts caused both by precinct consolidation (we went from 66 to 59 precincts) and by annexations by the cities of Fargo and West Fargo has caused us to re do our election maps and our on line precinct look up feature. Our IT department has been working with our office and the City of Fargo's Engineering and GIS departments to update our maps. At the same time they have been changing our precinct locator on the Web to use the GIS technology to make the look up easier. Kay will demonstrate the precinct [md a little later. We will also start working with The Forum, Casselton Reporter, and the West Fargo Pioneer soon to make sure that we can publish precinct maps in those papers to assist the voters. Our biggest concern with voters getting the correct ballot in their precinct is in the newly annexed areas of Fargo and West Fargo. We will be giving special instructions to the two election boards in those areas to ensure that the voters get the correct city ballot. Election worker training is going to be more intensive this year with the advent of new equipment and the voter identification requirement. We have updated our PowerPoint training aid for the election school. A lot of the items added have to do with the new equipment. We will give the workers copies of the training material, go over the procedures for setting up, operating, and closing out the equipment, and give the workers hands on training. We want our election workers to be comfortable with the equipment on election day. Voters having to produce some form ofID this year is new, we want to make sure the election board understands this new requirement and that they carry it our consistently. We don't want election boards to get lax on ID's because it becomes a real problem when you pick and choose who needs to show and ID - it's everyone! A state wide education campaign will also be done to inform voters of the new ID requirement. Absentee Precinct: The county is the only county that has been using an absentee precinct. Basically an absentee precinct allows us to process all absentee ballots at the courthouse on election day instead of transporting the absentee ballots out to the precinct. We started using the absentee board a few years ago because of the high number of absentee voters and the effect on the local election board. The same polls with a lot of walk in traffic were also the same precincts with a large number of absentees. Some of these precincts were still processing absentees long after the polls closed and this change allows us to better manage that workload. A change in the absentee precinct will be the use of the precinct scanners to process the absentee ballots. As that board opens the ballots, they will be deposited into the scanner. At the end the day we simply need to close the polls to get the totals - this will greatly speed up election night reporting. Election night reporting. With the use of scanners in every precinct, we will not be counting ballots at the courthouse. As precincts close they will print a results report giving the race totals in their precinct. They will turn in that results tape and a memory card from the scanner to our office. The memory card from each precinct, and the absentee precinct will be loaded into a PC in my office to accumulate the totals form all precincts. The election reporting timeline will be dependent on how fast precincts get into the courthouse. Once in the courthouse uploading each precinct only takes a few minutes.