Gary Smith Chair Forsyth County Registrations & Elections

Early Voting Wait Time Dashboard

Forsyth CountyWebsite Project

Gary Smith Chair Forsyth County Registrations & Elections

Forsyth County Early Voting Dashboard

County had five remote voting sites Some were new and had lower use Problem was how to spread out the

voters and provide quick updates Idea was to provide a real time access

for voters to determine where to vote – access via web

Project was developed with webmaster, IT and election office

Gary Smith Chair Forsyth County Registrations & Elections

•A file was set up with bandwidths associated in an excel spreadsheet

•Website is checking the file for any updates continuously

•Assignment given to individual in office who called the sites on an hourly basis

•Advance polling officer could easily determine length of line as we had put up signs that said "if you are here, the wait is 15, 30, 45, etc etc“

•Once data was entered, if the program saw a change, it interpreted the data and changed the color code

How it was done

copy right

Forsyth County, Georgia Early Voting Dashboard

Gary Smith Chair Forsyth County Registrations & Elections

Forsyth County, Georgia Early Voting Dashboard – newspaper comments

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Oct. 21, 2008

• “Forsyth’s early voters can go online to check wait times”

• “Residents now turn to the internet to see if they can breeze through early voting”

• “County elections office started monitoring the length of the voting lines and giving a heads-up to Internet-savvy voters”

• “A green light on the office’s Web site tells voters that the current wait is less than 20 minutes. A yellow light predicts they’ll be in and out in 40 minutes or less. A red light? That means the wait is more than 40 minutes”