What is “ballot on demand” and how does it work in Pinellas County?
Pinellas County was the first in Florida to use “ballot on demand.” This system prints ballots as needed, eliminating the need to order ballots in large quantities and then discarding all unused ballots after each election. In Pinellas County, a primary election can have more than a thousand ballot styles, which requires a lot of storage space if ballots are preprinted for each precinct. The ballot-on-demand system stores PDF (portable document format) files of each ballot style and uses information about the voter to generate the correct ballot style. Pinellas County uses ballot-on-demand equipment made by Runbeck Election Systems for mail ballots, provisional ballots and early voting, but does not use it at the precinct level.
