County Details Its IT Success in Vote Center Pilot

Nevada County, population 100,000, was one of the five counties in the state that signed up to be guinea pigs for the Voter's Choice Act project — an initiative to centralize voting in a handful of consolidated “vote centers” and use technology to make it all work.

And it worked. The rural Northern California county says the undertaking was challenging but ultimately successful — as evidenced by an innovation award from the California County Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA).

Steve Monaghan, chief information officer for Nevada County, described the process for Techwire:

“Our registrar of voters applied to the secretary of state to be in the pilot program. The SOS personally came to one of our board meetings and made the case to our board, who had to formally approve the project and associated budget.”

He added: “We started planning in February, purchased equipment in March, and ran an election on the new system and infrastructure in early June.”

The hardware for each of the seven vote centers included:

• Three check-in laptops
• Ballot printer and secure laptop
• Cradle point wireless router
• Switches
• Wire management and labeling
• Storage case
• A new Web server

“Our in-house network team designed the solution and then vetted it back through the SOS for approval,” Monaghan said. “We had a few of the other pilot counties reach out and ask us questions. Sacramento County’s solution was a very similar design and used the same remote network equipment we selected, so that was very reassuring to us.”

The pilot program required a complete overhaul of the process as well as cooperation among the county’s Information Services and Elections staffs. Geographic Information System technology was used to determine the locations for the centers. Connectivity and Wi-Fi bandwidth had to be evaluated. Each worker at the vote centers had to have a user account. Laptops had to be updated between June and November. VPN connections had to be verified, and the county had to coordinate with the Secretary of State’s Office. And security measures had to be put in place.

Monaghan’s view: “As CIO, you can imagine the red flags raised when your team comes to you with an extremely high-profile project, one that requires new technology that we have never worked with before, is on a very short time frame to be implemented, has a budget that is not robust by any measure, has an absolute hard go-live date, and there is unconditionally zero room for failure. All of this with the elevated ‘election hacking’ backdrop from what happened in the 2016 national election.”

He added: “We spent a lot of time on cybersecurity and even implemented the national MS-ISAC Albert intrusion detection system before the election — just for extra measure in covering all our bases.”

Under the heading of “Lessons Learned,” the county’s information packet lists:

• “Project planning and management was vital!”
• “Involve Elections staff”
• “Don’t be on the bleeding edge of software … Need a test environment for training.”
• “IS needs to be involved in future elections for security”
• “Will take less resources in the future”

 Under the heading “Vote Center Challenges,” the county lists:

• Operations much more complex than traditional polling places
• Training much more extensive
• Lack of secure technology
• Potential networking/bandwidth issues
• Costs of new equipment

“It makes me very proud of the teams here, equally in IT and in our Elections Department,” Monaghan said. “To be a CIO in an organization that has the talent and culture to pull a project like this off successfully is very rewarding.  The two teams worked as one and they all leaned forward to get this accomplished in a very short time frame.”