Set Up Ballot Printing from ES&S Unity

The ES&S Unity Election System interfaces with Voter Focus and EViD for printing of ballots during early voting. For ballot printing for pickup and in-office absentee voting, ES&S Unity 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 ES&S as your ballot printing vendor and tabulation vendor, see Enabling Ballot Printing in Voter Focus Admin.

  2. On the Unity system, verify that the political parties participating in the election are set up properly.

  3. 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.

  4. In the election record, create dummy ballot styles for Unity. The purpose of these dummy ballot styles is to inform Unity of the precincts (and parties if the election is a primary) that will be voting in the election. For a general election, set up one ballot style (for example, G1). For a primary, set up one ballot style for each party (for example, D1, R1, and N1).

  5. For each precinct split that will be participating in the election, assign one of the dummy ballot styles to the appropriate party, if that party has a ballot style in that precinct split. If more than one party is voting, then assign a ballot style for each party in each precinct split that will be voting in the election. To make these ballot style assignments, go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Ballot Styles > Assign Ballot Styles to Precincts.

  6. Create the export files containing information for Unity. To do this, go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Election Maintenance > Utilities >Tabulation Sys Exports.

Note:  If you do not see this button, it is because a tabulation vendor is not selected in VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Prec Reg/Elctns > Tabulation System Vendor.

Each of the buttons on the Tabulation System Exports dialog creates a file with specific information from Voter Focus. (See Tabulation System Exports for a description of each file.) The first six buttons each create a text file; the seventh button creates the file VRAB.VAL, which lists the precinct splits and parties voting in the election.

If you have a new ES&S system, you will need to create all seven files.

If your ES&S system contains district type and district information from a previous election and you are confident this information is up-to-date, you can omit the first two files (District Types and Districts), but creating them takes little time and it does no harm to export them to Unity again. The other five files are election-specific, so it is important to export them for each election.

Press each button in sequence to create its export file. Then copy them to a computer equipped with the Unity software.

  1. On the Unity system, select the VR import option to load the files into Unity. Refer to the ES&S documentation for instructions on importing the files and verifying the information.

If Unity reports any error conditions, correct them and repeat the verification process until you get an error-free run. It is crucial that the numbers for precincts and precinct splits match exactly between the two systems. Any discrepancies should be modified on the Unity side.

  1. Set up your ballot styles in the Unity system.

  2. Copy the file VRAB.INP from the Unity system to a network location accessible from your Voter Focus system. (This file will set up the ballot styles in Voter Focus for each precinct split and party participating in the election.) The VRAB.INP file can be found in the folder where you copied the export files in step 6 above.

  3. In Voter Focus, go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Ballot Styles > Set Up Ballot Styles > Import Unity Ballot Styles. Navigate to the folder where the VRAB.INP file is located and click Open to import the ballot styles into Voter Focus.

Note:  In the version tested by VR Systems, the first precinct did not have a ballot style assignment in the VRAB.INP file. This indicated a Unity setup issue. If the issue has not yet been addressed, you will need to manually assign the correct ballot styles to this precinct in Voter Focus.

  1. Delete the dummy ballot styles created in step 4.

At this point, you are ready to set up the workstations and EViD stations where users will be issuing ballots to Vote-By-Mail and/or early voters. For instructions, see How to Set Up Ballot Printing on User Workstations and How to Set Up Ballot Printing Setup on EViD.