On election night earlier this month in Connecticut, the secretary of the state’s office unveiled a new system for towns to report vote totals. The “Election Management System” (EMS) is being applauded for delivering faster results to the public. The process begins in advance of the election with the town clerk entering the names of each candidate on the ballot into the new online EMS. The towns’ head moderator inputs the actual results after polls close. “All you have to type in on election night are the numbers themselves,” Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said. “It then uploads automatically to our website and so you, you the public, get the results in real-time — terrific improvement over how we were doing things before.”
It used to be that you’d either have to wait days in some cases for the votes to show up online or you had to head over to the polling station to see if the results were posted. That’s because vote totals would be faxed from each town hall to the state. Then those numbers would have to be re-entered by state officials into a database. Merrill said that led to errors in reporting.
And how about those fax machines? It couldn’t have been easy for them to work on receiving faxes when polls closed statewide at the same time.
Full Article: Connecticut Has A New Way To Count The Votes | WNPR News.