ALLEN, Texas — The State of Georgia has finalized an agreement with Diebold Election Systems to purchase 6,000 of the company's ExpressPoll electronic poll books that will automate and streamline the check-in process at voting locations throughout the state. According to a news relesae, the ExpressPoll-4000 units will be used in conjunction with Diebold's touchscreen voting technology to further enhance the voting experience for poll workers and voters alike. The value of the agreement, which also includes general service support initiatives, is approximately $15 million.
The statewide deployment of the ExpressPoll electronic poll book continues Georgia's tradition as a leader in adopting the most accurate, accessible and user-friendly voting systems for their voters and poll workers. In fact, a Cal Tech/MIT study recently recognized Georgia for having the most significant reduction in voter error in the entire country. This nine-fold improvement in the voter error rate resulted in more than 103,000 additional Georgia ballots being properly counted in the presidential race in 2004.
Seven statewide elections and more than 750 local elections have already been successfully conducted on Diebold touch-screen systems in Georgia. This translates to millions of votes cast in a safe, secure voting environment on Diebold equipment.
The ExpressPoll-4000 will provide poll workers with immediate access to voter information at each voting precinct. Voters are quickly and accurately verified by poll workers who simply touch a few characters of the person's first or last name and/or date of birth on the unit's intuitive touch-screen interface.
The functionality of the ExpressPoll-4000 enables poll workers to immediately identify if a voter is not in the correct voting location, and can quickly provide the address of the voter's designated precinct. A detailed street map may also be presented on the ExpressPoll-4000, providing visual instructions to the location of the voter's designated precinct. The ability to rapidly verify whether a person is registered will reduce the number of provisional ballots issued in precincts.
"The automation provided by the ExpressPoll-4000 will make the election process more efficient for Georgia election officials, while expediting the check-in process and ballot issuance for Georgia voters," stated David Byrd, vice president of operations, Diebold Election Systems. "The ExpressPoll unit will also automate the time-consuming and expensive capture of voter history information, dramatically reducing the cost of manually entering this data in the state registration system following each election."
Registration information for all voters within a jurisdiction can be stored on the ExpressPoll-4000 to dramatically reduce the number of calls placed by poll workers to voter registration offices on Election Day. A poll worker can quickly and easily locate the name of any registered voter along with their appropriate precinct location, increasing voter convenience.
The ExpressPoll-4000 can also eliminate the need for costly printed voter registration books because the names of all voters in a jurisdiction are duplicated from the official voter registration roll for the respective election and stored within the memory of the unit. In addition, the ExpressPoll-4000 will be used in Georgia precincts to create voter access cards used by each voter to activate the Diebold touch-screen voting stations. The ExpressPoll-4000 will identify the correct ballot style for each voter based on stored information from voter registration files, further automating and refining the voter check-in process.
