Private sector clients may stop reading right now as the Ballot Report is intended for use by Public Sector clients. That said, clients who have noticed the new link associated with all the other election administration links in their account may be wondering what this Ballot Report is should read on for an explanation.
In public sector elections, when a voter transmits their ballot via an electronic ballot transmittal system like that offered by Skypunch, the election administrator must then transfer each voter's ballot selections into a consolidated tabulation system. One method for doing that is to manually mark a paper ballot as if they were that voter. You read that correctly–and yes, as one of the world's original creators of online voting technology who has devoted nearly every working moment of the past 20+ years to streamlining and modernizing election technology, it disturbs every sensibility in my being to have to write this in the year 2023–but a voter's selections submitted via an electronic ballot submittal system might need to be rekeyed, by a human, into a consolidated tabulation system. The Ballot Report accommodates such a process. As the name suggests it is nothing more but a report showing the ballot id of each ballot submitted along with a timestamp of when the ballot entered the system and the selections made by the voter on that specific ballot.
Until the public sector catches up to the private sector, this is the reality that must be reckoned with and the reason for this new Ballot Report.
