Page 40 - FCW, November, December 2018

Public Sector Innovations
Case Linking Request Bot to help people who want to access their case information through Ohio Benefits’ portal. According to Mehta, that bot “will process the backlog of 24,000 requests in approximately four weeks.”
PROJECT: Paper Automation and Digitization
Federal Election Commission
A smarter way to track
campaign financing
In the pursuit of accurate and accessible campaign finance data, the Federal Election Commission has long faced an unusual obstacle: Reports from Senate campaigns flow through the Senate — and the
Senate insists on paper filings. To speed the digitization of all that paper, the FEC contracted with Aurotech to develop an automated program that would capture summary data and itemized transactions.
A tool from Captricity “shreds” documents into small pieces that are uploaded to Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s distributed workforce platform. The mini-tasks are then distributed to employees worldwide, who clarify characters, such as differentiating a 5 from an S. Those human responses are used to train an algorithm that will anticipate which strings of text are likely to appear in certain fields, such as “$5-0-0” versus “S-a-n D-i-e-g-o.”
Previously, FEC workers scanned paper- filed reports, or received scans from the Senate, to post online and sent printouts to a vendor for data entry. An FEC spokesperson said the turnaround was as long as 30 days.
Now the FEC receives data within
five days — or less — of submitting the documents. In July, for example, reports were returned to the FEC from the paper conversion system in an average of 31 hours. The tool has an accuracy rate of 93 percent.
Nevertheless, the program’s future is uncertain. In September, President Donald Trump signed an appropriations bill that includes a provision to make the FEC the official point of entry for all Senate filings.
“The legislation [subjects] Senate filers to the electronic filing requirements that have applied to all other committees since Jan.
1, 2000,” an FEC official said. “So the vast majority of the reports that were handled through the paper automation project now will be filed electronically.”
PROJECT: Risk-Limiting Audits of Election Results
Colorado Department of State
Inspiring trust in elections
The buzz around election security often focuses on front-end vulnerabilities, such as voting machines, state registration websites and online disinformation campaigns. However, one state has taken the lead on implementing a critical form of backend vote verification that can alert officials if their election has been hacked.
Colorado is the first — and so far the only — state to legislatively mandate
and implement risk-limiting audits of its elections. Security experts consider such audits to be the gold standard for ensuring accurate election results. Rhode Island is poised to become the second state to adopt the approach.
Colorado relies on open-source software called ColoradoRLA that compares a random sampling of a precinct’s paper ballots with their corresponding digital votes. If it discovers enough discrepancies, the software flags the ballots for a larger manual count.
Anyone can download ColoradoRLA
for free and deconstruct its code. Dwight Shellman, county support manager at the state’s Elections Division, said officials wanted to give technology-minded citizens and organizations the ability to validate the state’s results for themselves.
“The whole purpose of a risk-limiting audit is to obtain a statistical level of confidence that the outcome of an election is correct,” Shellman said. “We needed software to do it, but it’s hard to go back to the public and say, ‘Trust us. This software we developed shows that we’re correct.’
That’s just not going to sell.”
Since Colorado instituted the audits
in 2017, Shellman said other states have expressed interest in the approach, and Colorado has sent representatives to
speak with other election officials about implementing their own versions. The state is also working with a vendor to build and enhance the software’s reporting capabilities for future elections.
PROJECT: Software-Defined Networking for DISN and DODIN
Defense Information Systems Agency
Speed, security and next-
gen networks for DOD
When the Defense Information Systems Agency needed a software-defined environment with automation and synchronization across the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), the backbone of the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN), it turned to Leidos.
Government and industry experts worked together for nearly six years to develop and deploy DISN’s first software-defined network in 2017. The results were automation through virtual private networking services and an ability to transition validation work and integrate it with the DISA Storefront. The solution eliminated significant man- hours and streamlined and automated the activation process.
Central to the solution was Leidos’ partnership with telecommunications provider AT&T, which combined best practices for developing the software-defined network and strategically targeted internal research and development investments.
DISA officials said the initial project’s success has been the foundation for plans to expand software-defined networking across DODIN to stay ahead of threats and effectively meet mission goals.
40 November/December 2018 FCW.COM