Import Tabulation Totals from ES&S Unity

View a flowchart of the ES&S tabulation-import process.

Before the voting history for an election can be updated, State law requires counties to reconcile the number of voters that were checked-in with the totals from their ballot tabulation system. By doing a reconciliation, you ensure that all voters who voted will get credit for doing so, and that no register pages were missed during the post-election swiping process. Any differences between the two sets of totals should be rectified. If this is not possible, the reasons for the differences should be clearly understood and documented as part of the election record. Once this reconciliation is complete, the voting history update can be processed using Voter Focus.

Voter Focus provides an automated comparison of tabulation totals with the totals accumulated by the various voter check-in mechanisms in Voter Focus—that is, mail ballot returns, check-ins of early voters (through the Counter program or via EViD stations), swiped precinct registers, the non-register records of those who voted at the polls on election day, and those who voted by provisional ballot. To run this automated comparison, your county's tabulation vendor must be capable of producing a tabulation results export file that can be read by Voter Focus.

  1. In Voter Focus, verify that ES&S is selected as your tabulation vendor (VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Prec Reg/Elctns > Election Processing Options > Tabulation System Vendor).
  2. On the Unity system, create an ASCII output file of the tabulation totals:
    3. Note: The following instructions reflect the Unity dialogs and prompts at the time this document was prepared. Please consult your ES&S documentation or representative for any updates ES&S might have to these instructions.
    • On the Create ASCII Results File dialog, select Create precinct detail - with Text.
    • On the Contests dialog, highlight the races you want to export to Voter Focus and also highlight BALLOTS CAST — TOTAL. To export all races as well as the total ballots cast, don't highlight any races.
    • On the Create ASCII Results File dialog, select Include Groups?.
  3. Copy the file to a location where you can access it from Voter Focus, such as I:\Vr6Sharedbinaries\ESStabulation.
  4. In Voter Focus, verify that the election you want is the focused election and that its status is Return Processing Only.
  5. Go to ELECTIONS > Reconcile History > Import Tabulation Totals.
  6. On the Import Tabulation Results dialog, you will see the ES&S voting groups defined in the Unity system. Work with your ES&S representative to match each of the five ES&S voting groups with a Voter Focus voting method.
  7. Click Start Import to open a Windows Open dialog where you can select the file to import into Voter Focus. (This should be the ASCII file you created in step 2.) The importation process usually does not take very long.

    If a precinct or precinct split on the Unity system cannot be matched to a precinct/precinct split in Voter Focus, you will see a prompt during the import asking how the data for the precinct in question should be handled.

    The import usually does not take long. It is finished when you see the message Results inserted into database.

  8. Click OK to close the message and click Cancel on the Import Tabulation Results dialog.
  9. On the Reconcile History dialog, go to Reconciliation > Voting History vs Tabulation Results. Select up to 10 precincts and click OK to run the report. The report compares the tabulated vote count with the check-in vote count and notes any differences.
  10. Resolve any discrepancies that you can. It may be necessary to go through the precinct register and verify that the voting history in Voter Focus was recorded correctly. For more detail you can print the Precinct Register Voting Details report, which provides a check-in count by precinct register page.

    For discrepancies that you cannot resolve, document the reason for the discrepancy and save the documentation with the reports archived for this election.

  11. Repeat steps 8-9 for the next batch of 10 precincts until you have run the report for all precincts and resolved or documented all discrepancies.