Case Study: King County Elections, Provisional Ballot Envelope
Shift from a traditional envelope to a specialty form/pasted pocket
Old Process: King County Elections approached us with a request to redraft a provisional ballot envelope that had very specific requirements, among them being a tear-off receipt for the voter that verifies the submission of a ballot. King Co. Elections originally used a traditional catalog envelope with a small NCR set without a barcode. The quantity was larger per each election and the NCR set was hand-applied by the vendor. In addition to the time-consuming aspects, the NCR sets were very expensive and cumbersome, tending to pre-release from the envelope over time
New Process: Trio Group NW developed a pasted pocket specialty form that used three plies of paper on a traditional press – two plies created the enclosing pasted pocket (envelope) and the third ply was a detachable short sheet attached to the envelope's bottom stub that served as a detachable receipt for the voter. The final product included both a human readable sequential self-checking consecutive number AND a bar code for easy processing at voter tabulation offices. There was a 100% guaranteed matching number on the envelope as well since the bar code needed to be an original and not a crashed copy on the top ply of the pasted pocket “envelope”.
Net Savings: Annual savings of $30,000 on print production and significant improvement in ballot processing via bar code and envelope “usability” by voter and elections processors.