Everyone knows that the waiting is the hardest part and with work, family and other responsibilities many voters don’t have time to wait in the lines they are sometimes greeted with during high profile elections or peak voting hours. Election administrators too admit that they lose sleep worrying about election-day lines and from resource allocation to polling place relocation, work hard to make sure that if there are lines, they are as short as possible. One county in Texas has done something about election day lines with the Voter Line Wait app. In 2009 Collin County became part of Texas’ vote center pilot program and have been a successful addition to the county’s elections arsenal.
“One of the biggest challenges is that voter turnout is not equally distributed between vote centers so the number and placement of locations is critical,” said Bruce Sherbet, administrator of elections for Collin County. Also, providing sufficient equipment and supplies to handle heavier turnout in certain vote centers can be a little challenging.”
Following the mid-term elections in 2010 when vote enters faced many lines, the county’s GIS Administrator Tim Nolan created an app to help voters find the vote center with the shortest lines closest to them.
“The EA [at the time] asked all the interested parties to come up with suggestions that might alleviate long lines – think outside the box,” Sherbet explained. “The GIS representative, Tim Nolan, thought we could do something with mobile device mapping and QR Codes. They took the idea and ran with it.”
Full Article: electionlineWeekly.