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Elections office presents Phoenix Graphics vendor tour; county highlights new ballot-tracking features
Summary
Elections staff described a visit to Phoenix Graphics, noting a 40,000-square-foot facility and redundancy in equipment that produces ballots from large paper rolls; staff said the vendor provides barcode tracking and other safeguards that county staff say improved the primary election process.
Erie County Council was briefed on the county’s use of Phoenix Graphics as a ballot vendor and shown photos and details from a site visit to the company’s Rochester facility.
An elections staff presenter said Phoenix Graphics operates a roughly "40,000 square foot facility" and stressed the vendor’s redundancy and production capacity. She described a system that prints ballots from large rolls (35,000 to 45,000 ballots per roll), uses multiple cameras and barcode stamps and encodes ballots, declaration envelopes and return envelopes so that the county can match a voter record to the correct ballot package.
The presenter said the technology includes diversion points for items that do not match the voter record and that the vendor prints barcodes on the outside envelopes to track mailed ballots. She told the council the company works with “over 75% of the elections in New York state and 19 counties in Pennsylvania, including Allegheny County and Philadelphia County.”
Council members asked about the vendor’s capabilities and the presentation emphasized the vendor’s inventory management, recycling of paper waste, conveyor and shrink-wrap processes to prevent damage in transit, and the use of cameras and humidity control to ensure reliable high-speed printing. The presenter said the county observed the vendor’s operations while it prepared for New York primaries and that the vendor’s systems reduced previous handling and tracking issues.
No formal procurement action is recorded in the transcript excerpt; the presenter said the county had already used the vendor in the primary with successful tracking of outgoing ballots and declaration envelopes.
