RAPID: Optimizing vote-by-mail implementations on consumer grade equipment

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As a result of the COVID-19 virus, many states are looking to rapidly switch from in-person voting to postal voting (also called vote-by-mail or VBM), in order to reduce the infection risks to voters that might come from in-person voting. Among the many challenges of increased use of VBM, commercial ballot printing services have limited capacity and will be unable to scale to support the surge in demand they will face. To mitigate this problem, VotingWorks, a non-profit, is developing an open-source VBM solution called VxMail, targeting small- to medium-sized counties. VxMail will use commercial bulk-mailing services as well as off-the-shelf hardware for printing ballots, slicing envelopes, and scanning the ballots to provide a secure, affordable, and highly scalable VBM solution. If VxMail is successful, it will have a large impact on the practice of voting in the November 2020 general election, by making VBM available to more voters.VotingWorks faces a variety of engineering challenges to ensure that VxMail will be accurate, including dealing with stray marks from voters, and damage that might occur to ballots in the postal mail. To address this, VotingWorks is partnering with a team from Rice University with experience in human-computer interaction and elections. This research will recruit thousands of participants, across the country, to fill out test ballots, yielding a large corpus of real-world examples. VotingWorks will use these ballots to validate and improve its scanning algorithms. Rice will use these ballots to measure voters’ accuracy at filling out the ballots and following the return instructions. With multiple rounds of these experiments, Rice and VotingWorks will be able to identify and remedy deficiencies in VxMail, leading toward better voter experiences and more accurate tabulation results.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.