Although this project focused on the iVotronic direct-recording electronic voting machine and its accompanying Portable Electronic Ballot, the manufacturer, Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S), provides solutions for the entire elections pipeline from elections oversight and setup to final tallying and audit. In fact, there is an entire system behind the voting booth to manage the chaos of election days. In the EVEREST report, Patrick McDaniel, et al., give three basic phases of an election:
In the Pre-Voting Phase, election officials design the ballots to be used and distribute them, along with the voting machines and voter records, to the polling stations.
The Voting Phase is when the citizen casts their candidate choice and their vote is recorded.
In the Post-Voting Phase, votes are collected, counted, and audited (if needed), and the results are certified within a time period set by local laws.
The iVotronic and PEB are put to use during the Pre-Voting and Voting phases. Prior to the elections, a supervisor iVotronic is given the ballot definitions and loads them onto a PEB, which in turn loads the ballot information onto the voter's machine. At the end of the election day, a supervisor PEB is used to close each of the voter iVotronics and to collect the vote totals, which are aggregated in the supervisor iVotronic before being sent to election headquarters for counting. Optionally, an iVotronic may have a Real-Time Audit Log (RTAL) printer attached via serial cable, which--as the name suggests--prints out a text log of every ballot as they are cast in order to provide a hard-copy reference for audit purposes; this project did not have an RTAL.
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