Thermal Printers: Customer Case Story

VotingWorks Elects A Winning Solution

More than half a million people step up during the typical American general election to perform an important but demanding job: serving as poll workers. A long day of answering questions and guiding voters culminates in a critical list of post-voting to-dos, including printing out, reading and signing off on vote tally sheets late in the night.

That’s a problem, because these reports can be as long as 100 feet and printed on receipt paper the width of a typical CVS receipt. That makes them very difficult to read correctly during reporting and auditing—a particular issue given that the majority of poll workers are over the age of 60, according to Pew Research.

“It's been a long-standing pain point in election infrastructure, not only understanding the information that's presented on the receipt, but then also making that a public asset—these are posted on the walls at individual polling places to look at,” says Matt Roe, Head of Product at VotingWorks, which designs and markets voting machines. The receipts must also be usable for auditing potentially years into the future, Roe adds.

Tackling the Issue

Roe’s company, VotingWorks, is a non-partisan, non-profit founded with a goal to create secure, affordable, open-source voting machines as an alternative to those produced by private companies. Being open source for every aspect of their products—software, hardware, documentation, and so on—is all about increasing public trust in voting equipment.

VotingWorks wanted to produce polling reports on 8-1/2x11-inch paper to make them far more readable and manageable. This meant that the printer needed to be incorporated into their ballot scanners, known as precinct scanners—the devices many voters feed their ballots into to officially cast their vote after marking them up by hand or with a ballot marking device.

An early proof-of-concept used an external printer that printed tallies on individual letter-sized paper sheets. The temporary solution was clunky, but the results were clear: 8-1/2x11 reports were a hit with poll workers and the jurisdictions that employ them.

“Our initial work in Mississippi showed that this is something that's really appreciated. It solves a lot of the pain points in terms of bringing transparency, auditability, and simplicity into the tally reporting process,” Roe says.

Regulatory and competitive requirements dictated that for the final design, the printer had to be incorporated into the device. As it sought out the right printer mechanism for the job, VotingWorks had several requirements:

• Uses a paper roll vs. individual sheets
• Small size and weight
• Affordable
• Reliable
• Embeddable

VotingWorks found the right fit with a direct thermal printer mechanism from FCL Components America, Inc., which on behalf of its Japanese parent company, FCL Components Limited, markets and distributes electronic components and sub-systems throughout North and South America. “Everything else that was really available missed the mark on at least one of those,” says Roe.

FCL Components engineers collaborated closely with VotingWorks to successfully integrate the printer mechanism into the VotingWorks precinct scanner. “It was super smooth sailing, Roe says, with FCL Components providing “all the resources we needed to get this integrated as fast as possible.”

VotingWorks also partnered with FCL Components’ recommended paper provider, Nakagawa Manufacturing, to source a paper stock that ensured every page is smooth and flat after printing, despite coming off a roll.

Creating a True Differentiator

VotingWorks’ new precinct scanner with its 8-inch wide printer is proving very popular with election workers, simplifying their end-of-day reporting process and getting workers to bed earlier.

The product is already in use in New Hampshire and Mississippi and is in the process of gaining federal certification, a requirement for voting devices in many other states. Voting machine procurement is a careful, slow-moving and highly regulated process.

“In every demonstration to any local election official in another state, this is something that is universally recognized and seen as a major improvement,” says Roe. “Election administrators may be concerned about taking a bet on a new company and changing the incumbent model that they've been working with for the past 50 years. This is one of those things that does make a difference and may lead election administrators to buy something new on the basis of product differentiation.”

Partnering with FCL Components has enabled VotingWorks to source a high-quality and durable printer mechanism to meet their exact requirements, Roe says. It also helps them stand out in a deeply entrenched market so they can attract new customers and increase revenue.

“Although it is somewhat of a small feature to a casual observer, having a larger printout is something that has made a meaningful difference for election administrators—and our ability to sell this product,” he says.