1. Ohio's Election Night Reporting system allows county election boards to securely upload unofficial election results via USB drives to the Secretary of State's website. This eliminates human error and speeds up reporting compared to the previous manual process. 2. The system displays results online within minutes of precincts reporting. It provides results to the public, media and national organizations. Over 50,000 users viewed results from the 2014 election across devices. 3. The system is built on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Election Night Reporting Common Data Format. This flexible format reduces costs and improves reliability compared to the previously custom-built system.

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Election Night Reporting
2016 NASS Ideas Award Application
Nominating Official:
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted
180 East Broad Street, 16th Floor • Columbus, Ohio 43215
POC for Follow-up:
Matt Damschroder, Chief of Staff
614.728.9132 • MDamschroder@OhioSecretaryofState.gov
Title of Program/Project:
Election Night Reporting Common Data Format
Project Lead:
John Dziurlaj, HAVA Developer
614.995.3206 • JDziurlaj@OhioSecretaryofState.gov
Description of Program/Project:
Election Night Reporting (ENR) is a web application that allows users to view election results during and
after an election at various levels of detail. It is broken into three phases – pre-election reporting, Election
Day reporting, and post-election reporting. Pre-election reporting details information known in advance of
an election: political parties, contests, offices, political geographies, etc. Election Day reporting focuses on
providing unofficial returns for the candidates and issues on the ballot. Post-election reporting provides
much the same as Election Day, but these results are generally more complete. The publicly facing web
application, ENR Public, can handle all three phases, although its focus is on the latter two. ENR Public
takes a single, canonical feed from an election authority to build all aspects of the reporting system.
Subject Area:
Elections
“In Ohio, it’s easy to vote. With thousands of locations to get registered, hundreds of hours to cast a ballot,
and three different options for voting, all eligible Ohioans have equal access to one of the best election
systems in the country.
Making it easy to vote and hard to cheat is the guiding principle behind my efforts to modernize and
improve elections in Ohio.”
- Jon Husted, Ohio Secretary of State

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History
Making it easy to vote and hard to cheat is the guiding principle behind Ohio Secretary of State Jon
Husted’s efforts to modernize and improve all aspects of elections in Ohio. Since his first day in office,
Secretary Husted has tasked his staff with reviewing and streamlining existing systems and processes in
both the Business and Elections divisions of the office.
With hundreds of hours to cast a ballot and three different options for voting (absentee in-person,
absentee by-mail or Election Day in-person), collecting, counting and reporting election results can be
a cumbersome task for boards of elections as well as any Secretary of State office. It requires multiple
hours and personnel to assure accuracy and in one of the most contested swing states in the nation,
there is no room for error or delays. In 2011-2012, the Secretary of State’s office began evaluating
the traditional ways these results were reported. Traditionally, members from the 88 county boards of
elections were required to manually count each ballot, transcribe the results by hand and send them
to the Secretary’s office. This process was time consuming, expensive and left room for errors. It also
delayed the distribution of results to the media and citizens.
Ohio’s Election Night Reporting (ENR) system was conceived in 2012 in preparation for the
Presidential Election using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Election Night
Reporting Common Data Format (ENR CDF). It was designed to collect election results and convey
them to the public through a simple, easy to use interface. Implementation of this new system sought to
address four issues: efficiency, accuracy, security and accessibility.
The ENR system is broken down into three phases – pre-election reporting, Election Day reporting, and
post-election reporting – and the ENR Public interface. Pre-election reporting details information known
in advance of an election: political parties, contests, offices, political geographies, etc. Election Day
reporting focuses on providing unofficial returns for candidates and issues on the ballot. Post-election
reporting provides much the same as Election Day, but these results are generally more complete. ENR
Public is a publicly facing web application that allows users to view election results during, and after an
election at various levels of detail. It only takes a single feed from an election authority to build all aspects
of the reporting system.
Prior to every Election Day, the Secretary of State’s office distributes a shipment of USB thumb drives
to the boards for use on election night to ensure the security of their tabulating system. The office also
provides them with a computer (connected to a dedicated T-1 line) to upload results. Each board of
elections is required to test its automatic tabulating equipment prior to the start of the count, and at the
conclusion, to ensure accurate counting of the votes. To assure fairness, board of elections are required
to designate teams with an equal number of individuals from each major political party to inspect and/or
tabulate the ballots.
The ENR system allows counties to copy results from tabulators via USB thumb drives, eliminating
human error. Although all counties still have the ability to hand-key results, the upload tool allows them
to do so more efficiently and without data entry errors. The system assigns and requires every board
of election to report results in a certain time-increment as soon as their first Election Day precinct has
reported. Results are then featured on the Secretary of State’s website within minutes.
OHIO’S ELECTION NIGHT RESULTS REPORTING SYSTEM - EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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Significance
Ohio has been an early adaptor of the NIST ENR CDF. As early as 2014, Ohio provided a feed of its
unofficial results in that format. In only one week, the Secretary’s office was able to build a prototype to
streamline the delivery of results from the precincts to county elections offices, to the state and out to our
citizens. This prototype is adaptable to any level of government and complies with the NIST voting system
standards putting Ohio ahead of the curve.
In 2015, the office took the next logical step, basing the ENR system on the ENR CDF. The ENR CDF has
solved real challenges with its uniquely capable and flexible format. Prior to the adoption of the ENR CDF,
Ohio’s system was custom programmed by the Information Technology division for each election. Today,
election officials have complete control over their own product, enabled by the data driven approach
inherent in the ENR CDF. This reduces risks and maintenance costs, and increases confidence in the
system. The ENR CDF export capability was seamlessly added to the existing Election Management
System (EMS) used by the Secretary’s office. Because of this, no staff retraining was required.
Elections vary in size, scope and type based on a predefined election calendar. While this calendar
provides some lead-time for customizations to be made prior to each election, a more efficient approach
was to create a generic front end of the reporting website. This site consumes and displays candidates
and issues at summary and precinct levels for primaries and generals. This was accomplished by
building a set of intelligent templates that are invoked according to the data presented to them. Public
interest in a given election is usually outside an election authority’s control. Because of this uncertainty,
worst-case scenarios are given particular attention. Scalability is ensured at different architectural levels
by keeping a copy of information as close to the end user as possible. This is used for a period before
making a request for new data and occurs in several different levels and assures that the system remains
responsive and any potential slowdown is not noticeable.
The ENR system has allowed the Secretary of State’s office to be even more relevant on election night
than in previous years. With the results uploaded and refreshed every 3-5 minutes on the Secretary’s
website, the media concerns were addressed and complete information was available in a timely manner.
Media and citizens are now able to access real time results as they come in. In 2014-2015, the new
interface was not only beneficial for our local media but national media too. The Associated Press was
able to consume our live feed for their news broadcasts. Individuals were able to view real time results
from the comfort of their own home.
Never before has so much been expected from web applications. Today, users receive information from
multiple browsers and platforms. Mobile application development has taken center stage in the consumer
market, with government agencies lagging behind. ENR Public is built in a loosely coupled manner. This
means that each component of the system knows just enough about the other components to perform
its task. This allows components to be interchanged as technologies and needs change. In 2014 and
2015 the results for the state issues were available online, through three XML feeds and an RSS feed.
The XML feeds included: XML Statewide Results, XML County Results and results in the NIST ENR CDF
Format. The feeds automatically updated every four minutes throughout Election Night. Statistics from
the Election Night Reporting website from this November’s election showed that more than 56,000 unique
users visited the site with more than 703,000 page views. The majority of visitors to our site were from
Ohio, but we also managed to attract visitors from around the world including Australia, London and UAE.
Six in ten users were on a mobile device.
The rise of mobile devices has led to a paradigm shift in software development. ENR Public is built from
the ground up to provide an excellent experience regardless of device used. ENR Public uses the same
technologies to support accessibility and has been tested on major screen reader products.

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The ENR system has improved the function of our state office in many ways; one of which is providing
a tool to monitor the county board of elections uploads and enforcing the directives required by law. It
allows the Secretary’s staff to be available for questions and solutions rather than crisis management.
This system has reduced the administrative burden for county boards of elections and Secretary of
State’s staff. Election reporting is now more efficient, accurate and less costly. The system is also ADA
compliant and provides a live information feed to anyone with interest.
Impact
This system, spearheaded by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, has also positioned Ohio as a leader
in election reporting. Ohio became the first state to comply with the NIST voting system standards.
NIST is creating standards and guidelines around a common data format (CDF) for election data so that
election equipment used in U.S. elections and interfacing software can interoperate more easily and
“speak the same language. The NIST-EAC Interoperability Public Working Group intends that standards
and guidelines being developed will be required in future versions of the Voluntary Voting System
Guidelines (VVSG). This positions Ohio as a leader in the field and enables us to inform the development
of these requirements for the Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.

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Support Materials
Ohio Secretary of State Election Night Results Website:
http://vote.ohio.gov/
Figure 1: Election Reporting Website Homepage

6. 6Figure 3: Reporting Summary Page by County Search
Figure 2: State Issues Reporting Summary Page

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Figure 5: A look at where visitors to our site from Ohio were concentrated.
Figure 4: The majority of visitors to our site were from Ohio, but we also managed to attract visitors
around the world including in Australia, London and UAE.

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Figure 7: Not surprising, the 9 o’clock hour saw the most traffic at 34,259 total users and when we peaked
at roughly 10,000 users who were on the site at the same time.
Article
Election Tech Tuesday: Ohio Tests New Standard for Election Night Results Reporting
(The Pew Charitable Trusts)
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2015/03/03/ohio-tests-new-standard-for-
election-night-results-reporting
Figure 6: In looking at the type of device a person used to access our site, we found that 6 in 10 users
were on a mobile device.