Imagine, no more keying or hand tallying of ballots...
Let CSS and our TallyMan™ software do it!

To ensure the highest level of accuracy for our election customers, CSS has developed rigorous procedures for processing paper ballots. Here is a brief description of this process:

• CSS applies validation rules (e.g., checks postmark and/or received dates) to each returned ballot envelope. Rejected envelopes are bundled and set aside.
• Each valid return is scanned to ensure that it is from a valid member and is the first return from that member. Rejected returns are bundled and set aside. Please see our Security section on for more details.
• CSS hand inspects each paper ballot to ensure that the ballot is scannable (i.e., the member made good marks with a pencil or a scannable ink color).
• The ballots are scanned using our Optical Mark Reader. As each ballot is scanned, we print a serial number on it as a unique identifier.
• The raw votes from the scanner are then loaded into our proprietary TallyMan™ software. Before any tallying can be done, TallyMan™ validates all of the votes from the scanned paper ballots.  For example, a member may have voted for 5 candidates for director, when a maximum of 4 are permitted.  In this situation, TallyMan invalidates the votes for that office, but retains any valid votes the member may have cast for other offices (e.g., treasurer).
• Once all of the ballots have been validated, TallyMan™ sums up the votes for each candidate by office.

TallyMan™ is also used to process votes from electronic ballots;  however, since our on-line voting system applies validation rules to electronic ballots as they are being cast, the validation steps described above are unnecessary.

TallyMan™ also includes the ability to tally small samples of ballots, making it extremely useful for Tellers Meetings, in which some tellers (members) are required to verify and certify the results of an election. For example, a teller randomly chooses a sample of 10 ballots, and hand tallies the results. The teller's results are then compared to the totals reported by TallyMan™. CSS also uses TallyMan™ as part of our in-house quality control process to ensure the accuracy of our election results.

Our proven combination of hand ballot inspection, machine scanning, validation checks, and quality control reviews with TallyMan™ have been shown to be more than 99.999% accurate in prior elections.  In nearly 20 years of use, only one erroneous vote has been discovered.