Kane County makes sure every vote counts with Relia-Vote™ Relia-Vote solutions help Kane County, Illinois efficiently process Vote-by-Mail ballots with accuracy, security, and transparency. Client profile • Kane County is one of the largest counties in Illinois with a population of 535,000 people and over 320,000 registered voters. • The County Clerk is responsible for overseeing and safeguarding elections including mail-in ballot printing and mailing and return processing, validation and counting. • During the 2020 general election, the county mailed 95,000 mail ballots– a dramatic increase over prior years.
Overview Voting by mail is on the rise throughout the country and the State of Illinois is no exception. With Illinois planning to expand “no excuse” absentee ballots, Kane County began exploring ways to process the anticipated increase in mail-in ballot volume. While preparing absentee ballots manually served the county well over the years, they needed more efficient printing, mail ballot assembly and ballot sorting solutions to cost-effectively process higher volumes. At their current volume, the process took a minimum of 6 people over 10,000 hours to manually process the mail-in ballots.
Business challenge
“It’s the best equipment out there and the most cost-effective when you consider the labor and postage savings.”
With the state looking to expand the use of “no-excuse” for absentee voting, it was anticipated the volume would exceed capabilities to manually process the ballots. “Vote-by-Mail is coming, and I needed to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of funding available through the CARES Act” said John “Jack” Cunningham, Kane County Clerk. Kane County needed an automated mail ballot processing solution that would ensure that the correct ballot was sent to the registered voter on time and be able to support any audit compliance.
— John Cunningham, Kane County Clerk, Illinois
BlueCrest / Case Study: Kane County Illinois
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