When New Yorkers go the polls on Tuesday, their vote isn’t the only thing that will be counted.

The time of day voters cast their ballot, whether they needed specialized services, or how many voting interruptions occurred at each polling site will be captured and analyzed – not by the city Board of Elections but by the company that built the city’s first electronic voting machines, Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S).

The goal is to create a more efficient Election Day experience for voters in the future, so that the long lines that plagued some polling locations as recently as the April 2016 primary become as outdated as ballots stuffed into a wooden box.

ES&S, an Omaha-based company that manufactures and sells electronic voting equipment to numerous states and localities, was founded in 2002, the same year Congress required all states to install voting machines that produce a permanent paper record.

That requirement came as a result of the 2000 election when a recount in the George Bush v. Al Gore presidential race was hampered by the lack of a backup record for every vote cast. At the time, most voting machines only counted the number of times a lever was pulled, making a recount subject to human error.  Bush beat Gore in Florida by 537 votes out of 6 million votes cast there.

In 2010, New York became the last state to comply with the 2002 mandate. The city’s election board decided to purchase ES&S voting equipment to comply. Under the system, voters fill out paper ballots that are then scanned electronically by the voting machines. This allows for quick vote computations, backed up by paper ballots.

A Treasure Trove of Data

ES&S’ new suite of software and tools, called Election Insights, was developed last year. Five types of data can be gathered and analyzed by the software:

  • Total volume of voters across the Election Day, as well as locations with highest total volume and highest turnout.
  • Interruptions to voting caused by, for instance, a ballot being mismarked, requiring a voter to go back and re-mark a ballot.
  • How much use any piece of voting equipment has gotten and what issues might be developing on that machine.
  • Special accommodations required for voters, such as ballots in languages other than English, or use of special software designed for handicapped voters.
  • The opening and closing times of each location and where to expect the greatest possibility of long lines in future elections.

The new software does not collect and analyze personal information, like issues or candidates an individual voted for, according to the company.

Kathy Rogers, senior vice president for government relations at ES&S, confirmed that the city Board of Elections is an Election Insights customer. Board of Elections officials did not respond to phone or email inquiries.

“If we start doing this over multiple elections, it will give [election officials] another tool to predict not just how many voters will show up, but what types of voters they are,” said Doug Chapin, an expert in election administration at the University of Minnesota.

Instead of tallying numbers and having humans count lines at polling sites, he said, the suite of software could create “a real-time map” for information like the demographics of voters who vote early versus those who vote on election day.

Based on this data, the software would be able to suggest how many poll workers are needed at what locations and at what times. It could also tell election officials where poll worker training might be necessary based on where ballots are being fed into machines incorrectly most often. The goal is a more efficient process, resulting in shorter lines on voting day, he said.