There is nothing new about clients having the ability to retrieve their voter roster for an election at any point during or after an election. The roster takes the form of a compressed Excel spreadsheet with one of the following three filters applied:
- Get all voters the same as no filter).
- Get only voters who have voted.
- Get only voters who have not voted.
Clients may go to the Manage Voters area of their account and click a link to quickly retrieve the file, reporting voting activity as it is at that exact moment. This served many purposes, for clients who would choose to send their own email reminders at the mid-point of an election to only voters who have not voted, to simply having a record of who voted after an election concludes.
But it only worked about 99% of the time. When retrieving larger voter rosters with more than 10,000 voters the request would time out because the time it takes to build one of these larger files takes longer than the server allows. Frequently clients with larger electorates (10,000+ eligible voters) run their election through an integrated model and never load a voter roster into the ElectionsOnline system in the first place, further reducing the likelihood this timeout issue would rear its ugly head.
Problem solved. The operability of the feature has now been rebuilt to work all the time regardless of the size of the file and how long it takes to build. With this change, the interface has also adjusted slightly. Clients still visit the Manage Voters area of their account and still have an option to apply one of the three aforementioned filters. But instead of the file downloading immediately to the user’s browser, you will now see a progress bar in the browser to let you know work is being done behind the scenes. When that work completes, and your voter roster is ready for download, the progress bar disappears and a download button takes its place. Clicking that button brings the freshly built zip file into your browser which you may open to access the spreadsheet of your voters.
You may download as many snapshots of your voter roster as you wish with previous download requests now archived in your account. This archive displays:
- Filename.
- Timestamp for when the file was created.
- The filter applied.
There is some very cool technology powering this newly redesigned feature worthy of its own blog post on some technology blog, but for clients this new archive with its easy-to-use interface should provide enhanced value to election managers.
