Ada County Elections Begins Printing Ballots on Demand
Posted on 10-05-2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 5, 2012 |
Contact: Phil McGrane
208-287-6880
|
Ada County Elections Begins Printing Ballots on Demand
(Boise, Idaho) – On Monday, October 15th, early voting will begin at Ada County’s Election Headquarters. However, this year there will be something distinctly different. Rather than being issued a ballot from a giant stack, your ballot will now be printed on demand! Working with Hewlett Packard (HP), Ada County Elections has developed new tools that allow them to print ballots as voters request them.
For the upcoming presidential election, Ada County will have 163 unique ballot styles that it must manage. These unique ballot styles result from the many issues that voters may see in each precinct, based upon which districts they reside within. The rotation of candidate names on ballots between precincts adds to the number of unique ballots there are, but rotating the names allows each candidate’s name to appear at the top of a ballot. Each unique ballot style must be readily available for early voting, so that each voter gets the correct ballot for their precinct. In the May primary election, Ada County had 471 ballot styles due to party selection. Being able to print ballots on demand adds accuracy and efficiency to the process of selecting the right ballot for each voter.
Additionally, printing ballots on demand is a cost savings to taxpayers. For each election, Ada County has to estimate the number of ballots it needs for voters. In order to ensure that a ballot is available for everyone who comes to vote, more ballots are ordered than necessary. This results is many unused ballots after each election that can never be used again. For the upcoming election, each ballot will cost the county $0.64 (or $0.32/page). In the past four years, Ada County has spent $141,000 on unused ballots for primary and general elections. This is because one precinct may have a high turnout, while another has a low turnout, and it’s difficult to project which precincts those will be. By using ballot on demand in early voting, there will be a cost savings by only printing the number of ballots that are needed.
Although Ballot on Demand is currently a pilot program, Ada County Elections hopes that it will prove an effective and viable option for elections into the future.