Case Study: VSAP
The VSAP Ballot Marking Device
Background
The Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) project was developed by the LA Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk in conjunction with IDEO and Smartmatic’s Los Angeles-based design and development team to address an aging voting system and an increasingly large and complex electorate. The award-winning project sought a collaborative approach to voting system design that puts voters at the center and maximizes stakeholder participation through a fully-accessible voter-centered approach to development.
Handheld controller, touchscreen and headphones
Development
Kate Ludicrum joined the Smartmatic team in 2018 as Ballot Marking Device Product Lead, responsible for every aspect of delivery of 35,000 new devices for the 2020 election.
Though leveraging Smartmatic’s OEM capabilities internationally, it was necessary to build the rest of the product organization from the ground up. In the first month, Kate recruited stellar local talent to assemble 4 teams: embedded systems, software, UX/UI and QA. Armed with a corps of over 50 engineers and designers, development proceeded with precision and urgency. Election systems are subject to federal and state certification in addition to standard electronics testing. And unlike consumer product launches, election deadlines cannot be moved.
While leading this organization through an accelerated development cycle, Kate served as the fulcrum for all stakeholder communication surrounding this critical infrastructure. Every step of development required buy-in from the Los Angeles County Registrar, design advisor IDEO, 3rd party auditing firm Gartner, Los Angeles community representatives, and manufacturing partners in Italy and Taiwan. Consensus was built in three languages, over 8 time zones.
2019 Mock Election
Testing at Scale
As the project reached completion, validation testing required rapid growth. Hundreds of seasonal employees and volunteers were recruited to perform functional testing, casting thousands of mock ballots. During this period, the QA and embedded systems teams also grew, deploying to testing sites to resolve defects in the field. Lessons learned from testing were used to develop the service design and training protocols for future vote center operations.
Game Day at the Staples Center, 2020
Deployment
Even under the specter of the coronavirus pandemic, L.A. saw an estimated 852K voters turn out to cast their votes in person using a BMD - about half of all voters - during the 2020 Presidential election. According to L.A. County Clerk Dean Logan, “We can now say, with confidence that the voting model we’ve adopted in L.A. County is sustainable. From a 95-year-old voter to a generation Z voter and everything in between, the system worked as it was designed and it got overwhelmingly positive reviews in its utility and in the intuitive ease of its use.”
