U.S. Alameda County will use RFID ballot tracking system to respond to the presidential election
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Since the controversial 2005 U.S. presidential election ended, many states have re-examined their voting systems. Part of the reason is that after the voting, some states did not set up a complete set of official procedures to regulate the transfer of votes from polling points to the central government. The process of storage room. Alameda is the seventh largest county in California and owns the city of Oakland and many of the eastern bays of San Francisco; the county now uses an RFID system to ensure the rationalization of the ballot collection and management process. Alameda first adopted this system in a small local election on November 6 last year, and plans to use it again in California’s presidential election on February 5.
In November last year, the Alameda Election Commission and the Maryland RFID solution provider RFID Global Solution jointly developed and tested this ballot tracking system.
The number of polling places in Alameda County varies according to the size of the election. The election on November 6 only used 27 polling points, but the next presidential election required a total of 810 polling points. At the end of each polling place, the staff put the following items in a canvas bag with anti-meteor zipper lock: a memory box containing the scanned results of all paper votes of the polling place; a PCMCIA card with a touch screen voting device (for The result of voting by disabled persons who cannot use paper votes); a list of persons who participated in the voting at that point.
Canvas bag with anti-fall zipper lock to store voting results
Previously, these three items and canvas bags used barcodes, and their identification codes were based on an alphanumeric agreement. After the RFID system is adopted, each item has a passive RFID tag that complies with the EPC Gen 2 UHF protocol at the same time, and its design conforms to the characteristics of the attached item, such as the tag used on the PCMCIA card with an anti-static backing. The barcode continues to be used as a backup identification method.
Before election day, all four types of items were electronically tagged in a central warehouse and sent to polling places. The ID numbers of the PCMCIA card, memory box and voting roster all correspond to the tag ID numbers of the canvas bag put in.
After the voting on November 6th, each polling place put the PCMCIA, memory box and roster into the corresponding canvas bag, explained Dave Macdonald, Director of Information Technology and Voter Registrar of Alameda County. Then, the county chief executive’s office sent a representative to deliver the locked bag to the local intermediate collection agency. Alameda has a total of 27 intermediate collection points, and only 5 of them were used in the November 6 election.At the collection agency, the employees of the Voter Registration Office use Motorola handheld RFID readers to read each tag in the bag and the canvas bag tag
The reader communicates with a central database using WEB data management software via Wi-Fi, and confirms that each package contains tags for three items. If there is a loss, an alarm will appear on the display of the handset, and the employee can quickly inform the staff at the polling office. In the November 6th election, this type of situation occurred twice, and the lost items were quickly found and sent to the central collection point. On the computer of the central counting agency in Alameda County, Macdonald can see the label reading status of the collection point through the software.
Before using electronic tags, the staff must open each package and manually scan the bar code of each item; then, put them back into the package and then lock it. This process is not only time-consuming, but may also damage the integrity of votes.
When the intermediate collection agency receives the canvas bags from all the polling points, it will send these bags from the collection agency to the central counting point, where the votes will be counted. When entering the counting point, the chief executive representative carrying the bag will pass through an RFID portal reader (including a Motorola fixed reader). When they passed by, the staff on the side looked at the computer screen, the computer and the connected reader software. A simple graphic will appear on the display, showing the ID number of each package and indicating whether all three tags in the package have been read.
RFID gate reader at the counting point
The staff confirmed on the picture that all three tags in each bag were read, and the number of tags on the picture was consistent with the actual number passing through the warehouse door. If a bag is missing a label, the employee asks the carrying representative of the bag to take the bag to a help desk. This ensures that other representatives can continue to pass through the portal reader without affecting the entire process.
At the help desk, another employee unfolds a smart table (including an antenna connected to a fixed reader). Because the tags are placed on the desktop longer than they pass through the door reader (which may also be subject to RF interference from the representative body), the smart table is more likely to read all the tags in the bag.
RFID smart table
In the November 6th election, any tags missed by the portal reader were successfully read by the smart table, and all items used in the election were identified one by one. In addition, the staff completed the calculation of all packages within 1 hour and 20 minutes after the package arrived at the counting point; previously, this process generally took 5 hours.
Since the RFID system has not affected Alameda County’s existing methods of collecting or counting votes, Macdonal said that the application of the RFID tracking system does not require the approval of the federal or state governments.
Although there will be more votes on February 5th, Macdonald is confident in the RFID system. In the future, he hopes to further use the RFID system to track thousands of voting devices, such as touch screen voting devices and paper ticket scanners.
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