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

由于COVID-19病毒，许多州正在寻求迅速从面对面投票转向邮寄投票（也称为邮寄投票或VBM），以减少面对面投票可能给选民带来的感染风险。在增加使用VBM的许多挑战中，商业选票印刷服务的能力有限，将无法扩大规模以支持它们将面临的需求激增。为了缓解这个问题，非营利组织VotingWorks正在开发一种名为VxMail的开源VBM解决方案，目标是中小县。VxMail将使用商业批量邮寄服务以及现成的硬件来打印选票、切片信封和扫描选票，以提供安全、经济实惠和高度可扩展的VBM解决方案。如果VxMail成功，它将使更多的选民可以使用VBM，从而对2020年11月大选的投票实践产生重大影响。VotingWorks面临着各种各样的工程挑战，以确保VxMail的准确性，包括处理选民的偏离标记，以及可能发生在邮政邮件中的选票损坏。为了解决这个问题，VotingWorks正在与莱斯大学的一个在人机交互和选举方面有经验的团队合作。这项研究将在全国范围内招募数千名参与者填写测试选票，从而产生大量现实世界中的例子。VotingWorks将使用这些选票来验证和改进其扫描算法。赖斯将使用这些选票来衡量选民填写选票和遵循返回指示的准确性。通过多轮这样的实验，Rice和VotingWorks将能够识别和纠正VxMail的缺陷，从而获得更好的选民体验和更准确的制表结果。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.