- Customer
- City of Philadelphia Department of Elections
- Partners
- CDW and Zebra
- Use case
- Capital assets & equipment
- Solution
- InThing Voting Equipment Tracking Solution (VETS) with Visium Mobile and Trapeze; Zebra MC3330 handheld and FX9600 fixed RFID readers
3,500
voting machines managed across 720 polling locations (November 2020)
~17,000
items under chain of custody by November 2021, up from ~1,700 in 2020
50%
lower cost of equipment reconciliation per election cycle
The challenge
More than one million people are registered to vote in Philadelphia, and every election ends with a rush to gather ballots, results media, poll books and voting equipment from hundreds of locations.
Before the November 2019 general election, the Department of Elections relied mainly on pen and paper to track the deployment and return of high-priority equipment and materials. Police officers and poll officials filed time-consuming paperwork as sealed bags changed hands, which made the chain of custody hard to prove and slowed kitting, auditing, distribution and returns.
The solution
The City chose InThing’s Voting Equipment Tracking Solution (VETS), running on a government cloud, with chain-of-custody control, precinct-based kitting, voting kit audits, delivery validation, automated receiving, real-time reporting and exception handling built in.
- Before election day: voting machines, poll books and other materials are tagged and inventoried at the warehouse before delivery to polling places.
- When the polls close: police officers collect the sealed bags and run a spot inventory with Zebra handheld RFID readers running Visium Mobile — at pick-up and drop-off — without breaking the seal.
- Back at the warehouse: Trapeze monitors equipment as it passes portals built with Zebra fixed RFID readers, inventories inbound material, audits for left-behind items and updates locations.
- Throughout: the City sees what was returned, when, and what is missing — and where it went missing.
The results
Philadelphia first used the system in November 2020 for 3,500 voting machines across 720 polling locations, tagging about 1,700 items and managing their chain of custody from the initial warehouse audit to post-election reconciliation. In November 2021 the City scaled up to about 17,000 items, more locations and tighter control of material movements.
- Real-time location updates for every item during the hectic returns process
- Misplaced items such as media sticks or poll books flagged immediately, instead of much later
- Contactless audits of sealed voting kits in kitting and staging
- No wrong or short deliveries to polling stations
- Days of manual work removed, so police officers finish election duties earlier
- A 50% reduction in equipment reconciliation cost per election cycle
Everyone was waiting in this one bottleneck and that’s where this idea came from. The old way of doing things is not going to work.
Nick Custodio, Deputy Commissioner, Office of Chairwoman Lisa Deeley