Page 38 - GCN, October/November 2018

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GCN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2018 • GCN.COM
Public Sector Innovations
aircraft and ships. Data flows from networks into RockNSM for scanning without decreasing network usability, stability or reliability.
By taking the project open source, MOCYBER created a cybersecurity community that spans the National Guard, industry, and domestic and foreign government agencies. The result is a constantly evolving capability that allows the military to respond more quickly and effectively to cyber adversaries.
PROJECT: OC Ballot Express Orange County, Calif., Registrar of Voters
on our end would be when we scan it into our system at our offices,” Kelley said. “We have 1,000 polling places...and 30 percent of voters are dropping their ballots off at a local precinct.”
PROJECT: Ohio Benefits’ Robotic Process Automation Pilot Project Ohio Department of Administrative Services
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
Making voting by mail
To reduce the time state workers spend
on repetitive tasks, Ohio’s Department of Administrative Services has adopted robotic process automation in the form of bots.
The Disability Onset Alert Bot’s main job is to eliminate the backlog in the web-based Ohio Benefits system, which determines eligibility for public assistance. Operating for three hours a day, five days a week, the bot cleared a backlog of 3,000 cases in five weeks, said Deven Mehta, program director of Ohio Benefits. “Perhaps more importantly, 92 percent of the cases reviewed by the bot were processed from end to end, requiring no caseworker attention,” he added.
Baby Bot’s goal, meanwhile, is to reduce Ohio’s high infant death rate of 7.9 per 1,000 live births. The national average is 6.1. The bot was put to use in Hamilton County in May, and within two months, it had enrolled 372 newborns in a managed care plan on the same day that the county received their information, removing any delay in medical coverage. Previously, it took employees up to six days to process a newborn’s information, Mehta said.
The automation also notified caseworkers that another 316 newborns needed to be reviewed for benefits and provided a path to addressing the issue.
Baby Bot was set to be implemented in all 10 Ohio metro counties this fall, and the Disability Onset Alert Bot went statewide in mid-September.
Building on those successes, Ohio Benefits has launched the Self-Service Portal Case Linking Request Bot to help people
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
more accountable
In Orange County, Calif., 55 percent of the votes cast in each election come via vote- by-mail ballots. To make the process more efficient and increase public confidence, the county’s Registrar of Voters pilot-tested an ambitious effort to enable voters to track their ballots during the primary election in June.
The agency added bar codes to the ballots mailed to voters and created an online dashboard where voters can track their ballots through every stage of the process and find out if there is an issue with their acceptance.
The Registrar of Voters collaborated with the U.S. Postal Service to develop the bar codes. “We’ve been working with the Postal Service for years because we are a large mailer in Orange County,” Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley said. “When we
were expanding our mailing system, we worked closely with their data folks to start integrating the data that we needed on our end.”
Kelley said the majority of voters were satisfied with the pilot process but noted that his office needs to do a better job of notifying the voters who submit vote-by-mail ballots in person at their polling places on Election Day.
“Since those ballots are not going through the Postal Service, the first indication data
Accelerating benefit
A smarter way to track
requests with RPA
campaign financing