RFID NEWS
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Alameda County Gives RFID Ballot-Tracking a Vote of Approval
On Nov. 6, each polling place inserted its PCMCIA card, memory cartridge and roster into its particular bag at the end of the night, explains Dave Macdonald, Alameda County's director of information technology and registrar of voters. Deputies with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office then brought the locked bag to a regional collection facility, Macdonald says, which is an intermediary collection point. There are a total of 27 intermediary sites in the county, but the Nov. 6 election required that only five be used. In this case, workers for the Alameda Registrar of Voters used handheld Motorola MC9090-G RFID readers to interrogate the tags inside each bag, as well as the bag tag.
The interrogator communicated, via Wi-Fi, with a central database in RFID Global Solution's Web-based data-management software, to verify that each bag contained the three asset tags that were supposed to be within it. If any were missing, an alert appeared on the handheld's monitor so staff could quickly alert workers at the polling location to find that asset. This happened twice during the Nov. 6 election, Macdonald says, and in both cases the missing components were quickly located and brought to the appropriate intermediary collection site. Macdonald watched on his laptop from the county's central tallying facility as the software indicated the interrogation of the tags at the intermediary sites.
Prior to using RFID, workers opened each bag, manually scanned each asset with a bar-code scanner and then placed it back in the bag, which was relocked. This took additional time and also posed a compromise to the contents' integrity.
Once each polling station had delivered its bag to the intermediary collection site, all bags were brought from that site to the central tallying facility, where every vote collected throughout the county was counted. While entering the facility, the sheriff's deputies carried the bags, in groups of up to six, through an RFID reader portal housing a Motorola fixed-position interrogator. As they did so, a staffer watched the monitor of a computer linked to the reader software developed by RFID Global Solution. This generated a simple graphic that showed each bag, by its ID number, along with indicators of whether all three tags within had been read.
The staffer made sure the graphic showed that all assets in each bag were read, and that the number of bags on the graphic matched the amount brought through the portal. If anything was missing, the staffer directed the deputy carrying the bags to a help desk. This kept the portals available for more deputies to continue bringing bags into the facility. "On election night, there is so much going on," says Macdonald. "If a bag [appears to be] missing something, we don't want to interrupt the workflow."
The interrogator communicated, via Wi-Fi, with a central database in RFID Global Solution's Web-based data-management software, to verify that each bag contained the three asset tags that were supposed to be within it. If any were missing, an alert appeared on the handheld's monitor so staff could quickly alert workers at the polling location to find that asset. This happened twice during the Nov. 6 election, Macdonald says, and in both cases the missing components were quickly located and brought to the appropriate intermediary collection site. Macdonald watched on his laptop from the county's central tallying facility as the software indicated the interrogation of the tags at the intermediary sites.
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| At the entrance to the central tallying facility, sheriff deputies carried the tagged polling bags past an RFID reader portal. |
Prior to using RFID, workers opened each bag, manually scanned each asset with a bar-code scanner and then placed it back in the bag, which was relocked. This took additional time and also posed a compromise to the contents' integrity.
Once each polling station had delivered its bag to the intermediary collection site, all bags were brought from that site to the central tallying facility, where every vote collected throughout the county was counted. While entering the facility, the sheriff's deputies carried the bags, in groups of up to six, through an RFID reader portal housing a Motorola fixed-position interrogator. As they did so, a staffer watched the monitor of a computer linked to the reader software developed by RFID Global Solution. This generated a simple graphic that showed each bag, by its ID number, along with indicators of whether all three tags within had been read.
The staffer made sure the graphic showed that all assets in each bag were read, and that the number of bags on the graphic matched the amount brought through the portal. If anything was missing, the staffer directed the deputy carrying the bags to a help desk. This kept the portals available for more deputies to continue bringing bags into the facility. "On election night, there is so much going on," says Macdonald. "If a bag [appears to be] missing something, we don't want to interrupt the workflow."
