Elections staff propose written adjudication policy, two-database workflow and staffing changes to speed up election-night counts

Summit County elections staff presented a series of proposed changes to ballot adjudication and election-night workflows designed to reduce bottlenecks, shorten recount and audit workload and speed unofficial results reporting.

Staff proposed three main changes: (1) a written adjudication policy, modeled on Cuyahoga County’s manual, that would give staff a board-approved “recipe” for routine adjudication decisions; (2) delegating day-to-day adjudication tasks to IT and absentee staff teams (including bipartisan reviewers) under that written policy while reserving high-stakes voter-intent questions for the board; and (3) using two databases during the pre-certification period — an “unofficial canvas” database with full, white-glove adjudication, and a “last call” database to collect late or Monday/Tuesday batches that would be merged into the unofficial…