El Paso, TX & Gems Reporting

[Jeff Hintz <jhglobal@earthlink.net>]

I am going to get started on setting up the Election for El Paso, TX and 
since talking with them, they still have a few concerns about how the 
Reporting is going to work for this election.  Last November, for the El 
Paso, TX Amendment Election, there was a Import BRC Results feature added 
to Gems in order to be able to add our Early Day Voting results with their 
Election Night results.  We were able to do this successfully, however 
there are a few things that the County would like to see improved. 
 Currently, in order for us to be able to Import totals into Gems, they 
need to run a Precinct by Precinct report to disk.  This took about 20 
minutes for the Amendment Election, and I am sure it will take much longer 
for their Primary Election.  They can create a Summary Report in less than 
a minute, and that is what they would like us to Import into Gems.  I know 
that in order to create a Summary Report in Gems, you need the totals from 
each individual Reporting Precinct, Race, & Candidate.  But is there a way 
that we can take their Summary Report and merge our Summary Report to get 1 
Grand Total, since this is all they are looking to give to the Media during 
the night, without having to create a Precinct by Precinct Report from 
their system???  Or possibly, is there a way that we can Export our totals, 
so they can Import them into their system and do all the reporting on their 
side???

Also, when they did create a Precinct by Precinct Report to disk from their 
system, the file is too big for the disk and looses some of the Precincts 
at the end.  I had to have them create 2 disks for me, and then using DOS, 
I merged those 2 files into 1 so it was correct for Gems.

Another downfall was that when we Imported their results, whether it was a 
zero report, or a report with totals just for 1 precinct, our report stated 
that we had 100% of the precincts reporting.

Since alot of this is to blame for the short comings of their system, I 
didn't know whether to write these items up as RCR's or to just let people 
know what El Paso is complaining about.  Please let me know if I should put 
these into the RCR list.

Thanks,

Jeff Hintz
Global Election Systems