This article was written regarding work conducted under legacy company names: Continental Mapping, GISinc, or TSG Solutions. These three companies merged in January 2021 to form a new geospatial leader Axim Geospatial.
Axim Geospatial completed several enhancements to Esri’s Polling Locator template application that allows voting citizens of Collin County, Texas to locate the most convenient polling location in their area. The project was just one of many ways the County wanted to leverage the ArcGIS platform to better serve citizens.
One of the new enhancements allows users to visualize wait times to help them decide which polling place to visit. They then have the ability to print these locations, along with directions to their polling place destination. If a user has arrived at a polling location and finds that the lines are too long, they can use the app to scan a QR code, posted at the polling location, and select a different location to vote.
In the past, the County had difficulty with server downtime during elections. This caused several interruptions for voters attempting to use the website and Election Polling Place Application.
In contrast, the 2014 midterm elections proved to be an enormous success with zero server reboots, 174,242 total page views, 19,020 visits to the Election Polling Place Mapping Application, and 26,842 routes generated from the Election Polling Place Application. Thus, Collin County, Texas received the 2015 URISA Exemplary Systems in Government (ESIG) Award for a Single Process System.
“With the help of Axim we were able to put together a more sound application and an overall better experience. We rolled out a new website version earlier this year and were pleased that we experienced no downtime during the recent midterm elections due to the follow-up improvements to our system. Also, having self-contained routing directions created a much better user experience for our citizens and allowed them the ability to more easily find the best location to vote.” - Tim Nolan, IT Applications Manager with Collin County, Texas