York County Director of Elections Walt Latham was recently awarded the Virginia Electoral Board Association’s 2016 Jensen-Hager Best Practices Award for his exemplary work facilitating smoother elections throughout the state.
Last week, Latham was recognized with this year’s award for his creation of a simpler and more straightforward “statement of results” form, which is used to record the result of an election at each precinct.
Seeing the need for more direct and easy to use form, Latham set about completely overhauling the existing form to this end, according to a recent news release from the York County Electoral Board.
The new design included the removal of outdated portions of the form that applied to manually accounting for paper ballots – a process no longer used since last year’s purchase of voting machines that scan and digitally count paper ballots.
The result of this change is the process for closing polling stations at the end of the voting period has become much smoother, and post-election canvass has also been easier.
The simplified form can be adapted to polling stations all over the state and makes the training of election officials easier.
