An enterprise app to register Alberta voters

Project Details

An Award-winning Multi-Platform Application

Elections Alberta is an independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly responsible for administering provincial elections, by-elections and referenda; they administer the Election Act and the provincial electoral process in Alberta. As Alberta moved towards the next provincial election, the thought of tackling the legislated enumeration process the old way – with paper and pencil, manual data entry, and the like – wasn’t ideal.

This meant we had to design and build a platform that handled all that data, securely and in a performant manner, while also designing efficient, user-centric workflows. The enterprise web application included support for three key enumeration workflows: self-enumeration (where any eligible Alberta resident can log-in, validate their credentials, check their voter record for accuracy, and update if required; phone enumeration (where call centres use the application to update the records of voters who chose to call in); and door-to-door enumeration (where 7000 workers went door-to-door with tablets running the software).

Unique Features

The award-winning application we built for Elections Alberta also had a number of unique features required to support a variety of edge cases, and specific requirements like:

1. Offline data storage, for door-to-door enumerators who lost signal, wherein the application would save data in-browser using PWA techniques and automatically upload the data to the server when a connection was detected
2. Work planning functionality, wherein door-to-door enumerators logged in and created to-do-lists so their managers knew where they were planning to be when out in the field
3. Support for multiple statuses, wherein door-to-door enumerators reported (within the app) on items like: how many visits they’ve made to an address, whether or not the address had been successfully enumerated, etc.

Results

In the end, 1.5M addresses were updated over the approximate 10-week enumeration period – a considerable number. Elections AB was then able to pull reports as needed from the database for their internal use. Overall, it means the voting process for our next provincial election was made that much easier for those who choose to vote. That’s the kind of work worth getting excited for.