Set Up Ballot Printing from Dominion GEMS®

Note: The steps marked ballot printing only should be skipped if your objective is importing ballot styles from GEMS but you do not intend to use the GEMS ballot printing feature. If you are setting up ballot printing, you must follow all the steps described in this section.

GEMS is a registered trademark of Dominion Voting Systems. Inc. in the United States.

GEMS interfaces with Voter Focus and EViD for printing of ballots during early voting. For ballot printing for pickup and in-office absentee voting, GEMS interfaces with the Counter program and the facility for issuing ballots from the Vote-By-Mail tab in voter records.

This topic describes the procedure for setting up the interface for ballot printing initiated by Voter Focus and EViD users. For a flowchart illustrating this procedure, click here.

  1. If you have not selected Dominion as your ballot printing vendor and tabulation vendor, see Enabling Ballot Printing in Voter Focus Admin.

  2. In Voter Focus, create a record for the election if you haven't created one already. See Create an Election in the Database for instructions.

  3. In the election record, mark the precincts and precinct splits that are voting. To do this, go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Elections Settings > Ballot Styles > Assign Ballots Styles to Precincts. Highlight the first voting precinct or precinct split and select the Voting check box; repeat for all voting precincts. For each non-voting precinct, verify that the Voting check box is clear.

  4. If any precincts or precinct splits are to be temporarily reassigned to different polling places for this election, make those reassignments. See How to Change a Precinct's Polling Place for a Single Election for instructions.
  5. Create a Sandbox database for testing of the ballot styles imported from GEMS. See Create Sandbox Database for instructions. If you have an existing Sandbox database, you will need to recreate it to include the setup you did in steps 3–4.
  6. In the GEMS system, set up the election. Turn on the voting precincts/precinct splits and consolidate precincts that will be using the same ballot style. (This might mean that some precinct splits have no ballot style after the styles are imported into Voter Focus, but this can be adjusted after the import.)

  7. In GEMS, select Card Data Export. Copy the resulting file named CardData.txt to an area accessible to Voter Focus. Other files created by the Card Data Export facility can be ignored.

  8. Run Microsoft Excel and open CardData.txt. Save it under a different name, such as CardData-modified.txt.

    Note:  If you are not an experienced Excel user, we suggest you print the exported file and manually enter the ballot style data into a text file. Format the file according to the instructions below, separating the data for each column with a comma.
  9. Modify the Excel file as follows:
    • The first line of the file must contain the following case-sensitive text: VoterFocus Ballot Data.
    • The remainder of the file must consist of the first four columns with the data noted below. If sequence numbers are used for ordering or identifying ballot styles, these values should be in columns 5 through 12.

    10. Column

    Contents

    1

    Precinct number

    2

    Precinct split number (can be same as precinct number)

    3

    Party — Use these codes:

    • GEN—For all general elections
    • DEM—For Democratic party ballots in primary election
    • REP—For Republican party ballots in a primary election
    • NPA—For non-major party ballots in a primary election

    4

    Ballot style
    5 — 12

    Optional sequence number(s)

    • Sequence #1 in column 5
    • Sequence #2 in column 6
    • Sequence #3 in column 7
    • Sequence #4 in column 8
    • Sequence #5 in column 9
    • Sequence #6 in column 10
    • Sequence #7 in column 11
    • Sequence #8 in column 12
  10. Save the file as a comma-delimited text file. The file name is not important, but the extension must be TXT.

    Import file without sequence numbers

    Import file with sequence numbers

  11. In Voter Focus, display the drop-down list for Database and select Sandbox Database.
  12. Import the TXT file into Voter Focus. To do this, go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Ballot Styles > Set Up Ballot Styles > Import Unity Ballot Styles. The List of Ballot Styles dialog opens.

  13. Locate the TXT file you created in step 8 and click Open to import the ballot styles.

  14. Click OK, close the dialog, and go to Ballot Styles > Assign Ballot Styles to Precincts. The Election Precinct Details dialog opens.
  15. Verify that all voting precinct splits now have a ballot style assigned. (Check the Style columns for each precinct split whose Voting check box is selected. We recommend you run the report Ballot Style Assignments and compare it to the corresponding report provided by GEMS.

You might discover that some precincts/precinct splits have no ballot style assignment. This is not unusual; it is the result of the GEMS precinct-consolidation process. To rectify, assign existing ballot styles to those precincts/precinct splits. Note that these must be ballot styles imported from GEMS; you cannot create ballot styles in Voter Focus and export them to GEMS. If there is no correct ballot style to assign to a precinct, you will need to return to GEMS, adjust your precinct consolidations, and export the ballot styles again (beginning with step 6 above).

  1. Ballot printing only. When you are satisfied that all voting precincts and parties have correct ballot style assignments, set up early voting for the election in the Sandbox database and run a good portion of the ballots for each precinct/party combination.

If there are assignment errors, go back to the GEMS system, readjust the precinct consolidations and ballot style assignments, and repeat steps 7–13 until the proper ballot style is printing for each precinct/precinct split/party combination.

  1. On the Console, display the drop-down list for Database and select Normal Database.
  2. Go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Ballot Styles > Set Up Ballot Styles > Import GEMS Ballot Styles. Locate the TXT file you worked with in steps 7-9 and click Open to import the ballot styles into the live database. If you ran the file more than once during testing on the Sandbox database, be sure to import the latest version of the file.
  3. On the List of Ballot Styles dialog, you might want to review the imported ballot styles and add descriptions. Avoid changing the ballot style names: they must exactly match those in the GEMS system.

At this point, you are ready to set up the workstations and EViD stations where users will be issuing ballots to mail ballot and/or early voters. For instructions, see Connect to a Ballot Printing on User Workstations and Set Up Ballot Printing on EViD.