iPads will help Alabama voters in 15 counties get to the right polling places

Credit: Stu Spifack via Flickr

During every election, poll workers in Morgan County, Ala., would experience a big problem: some voters would arrive and their names couldn't be found on the voter registration lists in many of the county's 44 voting precincts. That would then mean a scramble to try to reach someone by telephone back at the county Board of Registrars office – on a very busy day – to find out where the voter was actually registered.

On Election Day, especially during Presidential elections when voter turnout is usually much higher, those kinds of last-minute requests really put pressure on employees in the overwhelmed Registrar's office, said county probate Judge Greg Cain.

"You had to call the Registrars Office and have it looked up, then convey it to the voter," said Cain. "It was quite a time-consuming task. With 71,000 registered voters and 44 precincts in the county, that could amount to a ton of phone calls, many of which would get a busy signal or be put on hold. We actually had several voters get frustrated and just leave without voting."

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There had to be a better way, said Cain.

After three years spent investigating methods to streamline the process, Morgan County started using Apple iPads and a custom software app earlier this year during the March Primary Election to make the process simpler. Now election workers can get that information right on their iPad, without any calls to the Registrar's Office, making it much faster to help voters find their correct precincts.  

The main technical problem that took so long to solve was that the state maintains the database of voter registration in Alabama and only allows election officials in the state's 67 counties to gain access to certain data fields for custom data sorting, said Cain. "There are a limited number of people in the county who can see that information due to privacy issues," he said.

"What I was looking for was a system that could allow us to extract the data for the poll workers to use that was easy and accessible," said Cain. Simple was important because many of the poll workers are retired people who are not as savvy with computers and technology. That meant avoiding laptop computers due to their smaller keyboards, potentially confusing interfaces and more complicated nature. "I was looking for something that was user-friendly."

First he tried ways of accessing the voter registration information using an Android device, but he couldn't find an app that would easily work on Android to solve the problem. One Android app required him to export the data, send it to the vendor for conversion, and then download it to each device for use.  

"That was way too complicated and I wasn't comfortable sending that information out," said Cain. "I wanted some we could control in-house."

His experiments led him to a simple database app from Bento that would work with Apple devices, but it didn't provide enough detail and flexibility.  That failure, however, led to his finding an answer that did ultimately help solve the problem – Bento's parent company, Filemaker, had a mobile product that could be integrated with the data so it could work on Apple devices, providing the means to get the voter registration information to each of the county's precincts.

Cain brought in the county's software consultants, Mirus Group, and in six weeks Mirus built a first version of the needed app for testing, using Filemaker Pro.