Project Background

This past election season, Blue Raster worked with San Patricio County, Texas, to deploy GIS work flows for the county Elections Office.

Located just north of Corpus Christi, on Texas’s Gulf Coast, San Patricio County has a population just shy of 70,000. The San Patricio County Election Office is in charge of 14 Voting Centers and 4 early voting locations across the county to serve their voting population during the early voting period leading up to election day through the first Tuesday in November.

The Need for an Elections Management Solution

To better inform staffing decisions and improve reporting workflows for early voting and during election day, Blue Raster helped to deploy the Esri's Election Management Solution within the county’s ArcGIS Online Organization to create a GIS-focused management and reporting solution for the county Elections Office. The Election Management Solution creates a handful of configurable applications and workflows that allow for elections officials to facilitate Poll Worker duties, applications for poll watchers and volunteers, a public ArcGIS Hub site for transparency, and an ArcGIS Workforce integration for easy work order and assistance request management which can all be tailored to the users needs.

Implementing GIS Workflows for San Patricio's Election

To aid San Patricio’s Election Office in adopting more GIS-focused practices, Blue Raster helped to deploy the Election Wait Time Reporting Tool and a custom Voter Turnout Reporting Tool for the county. Using the data structures already provided with the Election Management Solution, Blue Raster created a Survey123 form that allowed Voting Center workers to report daily turnout. At the end of each day during the early voting period, election officials could use the Survey123 form to select their voting location from a dropdown list and report on the number of voters that cast ballots at their location that day. During Election Day this process was the same, but workers reported every 2 hours throughout the day.

San Patricio's Voter Turnout Reporting Form

To improve public transparency of turnout throughout the process, the reported turnout fed a Public Dashboard created specifically for the customized Voter Turnout reporting tool, which was designed to mimic the simple usability already present in the other Election Management Solution Apps. This dashboard was hosted on the County’s Election Office webpage and provided live updates throughout the open voting period.

Dashboard displaying voter turnout

This Voter Turnout reporting helped to provide public transparency, while getting Election Office officials experience using GIS tools without overcomplicated workflows that would have led to a less successful user experience.

San Patricio's Internal Election Tracking Dashboard

Interested in GIS for Elections?

Visit Blue Raster's GIS for Elections Capabilities Page to learn more about how we support State and Local Governments with GIS support around elections. Reach out today to get started!