Professor Helps Make Voting More Efficient

Students Nicholas Bernardo, James Houghton, Tim Jonas and Professor Gretchen Macht have been working on making the voting process more efficient in Rhode Island and across the country. Photo by Autumn Walter

Gretchen Macht uses technology to speed up the democratic process

An engineering professor and her students are using cutting-edge technology to make voting faster and more accessible in Rhode Island and across the country.

The Rhode Island Department of State reported that significant delays in the voting process were reported during the 2016 election, especially in East Providence, Jamestown, Pawtucket, Providence and Warren. 

Some voters in these locations reported waiting over two hours to vote, while the Presidential Commission on Elections Administration recommends that a voter should not have to wait more than 30 minutes. Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea tasked assistant systems engineering professor Gretchen Macht to research voting systems, and determine what can be done to streamline the process.  

Macht received a $226,942 grant called RI VOTES (Rhode Island Voter OperaTions & Election Systems) funded by the RI Secretary of State’s Office, the College of Engineering, the Board of Elections and the Democracy Fund. Using this grant for her research, the state applied Macht’s findings, bringing the voting check-in time down from three minutes to just over a minute.

Macht’s team used Simio, a simulation software, to simulate elections. According to Nicholas Bernardo, a graduate systems engineering student and member of the RI VOTES team, the software illustrated how people move through the voting system, as well as long voting waiting times. The team applied data from previous elections into the Simio software, and fine-tuned the model based on different variables such as the length of ballots, layout of voting locations, times of day and the use of electronic check-in. 

By tinkering with these simulations, the RI VOTES team made suggestions to the Board of Elections that streamlined the 2018 midterm election. Solutions included increasing or decreasing the amount of voting equipment each polling location needed, using electronic poll pads for voter check in and changing the physical layout of voting queues.

“We were able to use some simulated elections to provide recommendations to the Board of Elections during the 2018 midterms, with respect to things like how much equipment should be sent to each location,” Bernardo said. “It was considered very successful according to the Secretary of State, because there were no wait times or any huge issues.”

The team received even more data during the 2018 midterm elections that they will use during the 2020 elections. The team is also planning to apply their research outside of Rhode Island. Macht received a second grant from The Democracy Fund worth $200,000 to continue her research on a national level. However,  there are several challenges that researchers face.

“Every single place is different,” graduate student and researcher James Houghton explained. “There’s no one perfect way, like for a solution that will work well in Rhode Island. There’s some odd state we’ll have developed somewhere else that it just wouldn’t work. So for people who do this type of research, kind of making like one size fits all recommendations can be kind of difficult as well as inaccurate.”

However, Macht said that she hopes that other states can take her team’s research as a baseline so each state can alter their voting systems to meet their own needs.

Macht believes that making voting accessible is key for a functioning democracy. She added that by making voting faster, more people will be willing to participate in elections.

“I just want the community at large to know that whether or not you choose to vote or you don’t choose to vote or who you vote for, the community of voting is preparing and really excited for you to do so,” Macht said. “They work very hard day in, day out to make that available to everyone.”