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

由于新冠肺炎病毒，许多州都在寻求快速从面对面投票转向邮寄投票(也称为邮寄投票或VBM)，以降低可能来自面对面投票的选民的感染风险。在增加使用VBM的许多挑战中，商业选票打印服务的能力有限，将无法扩大规模以支持它们将面临的需求激增。为了缓解这一问题，非营利性组织VotingWorks正在开发一种名为VxMail的开源VBM解决方案，目标客户是中小型县。VxMail将使用商业批量邮件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、负担得起和高度可扩展的VBM解决方案。如果VxMail成功，它将使VBM面向更多选民，从而对2020年11月大选的投票实践产生巨大影响。VotingWorks面临着各种工程挑战，以确保VxMail的准确性，包括处理选民的错误标记，以及邮政邮件中可能出现的选票损坏。为了解决这个问题，VotingWorks正在与来自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来填写测试选票，从而产生大量真实世界的例子。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在填写选票和遵循选举指示方面的准确性。通过多轮实验，莱斯和VotingWorks将能够识别和修复VxMail中的缺陷，从而带来更好的选民体验和更准确的列表结果。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.