Digital Transformation

Every 5 years, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (“Teamsters”) holds the IBT Delegate and International Officer Elections. The election is conducted and supervised by the, the Office of the Election Supervisor (“OES”). One of the activities that is facilitated by the OES during the election cycle is candidate accreditation. In the past, candidates seeking accreditation would accomplish this by using old-fashioned paper petitions which were collected by candidates and their representatives and returned to the election office for verification and accreditation. Candidates and their representatives often attend meetings, stand in parking lots, and hold events to collect thousands of signatures in person. In turn, the OES staff would then statistically sample the signatures and test for membership, look for duplicates and confirm the validity of the signatures. This process was both time consuming and cumbersome for both staff and candidates.

Due to office closures related to COVID-19, restrictions against large gatherings in many states and disruptions of traditional operations, this long-standing practice was suddenly no longer a viable option to collect the thousands of signatures required for candidate accreditation. Our challenge was to devise a way to for the process to be moved online and still meet candidate filing deadlines and requirements.

Working with OES staff, we devised an online system to collect and validate petition signatures for the candidates in real time – CARS: The Candidate Accreditation Reporting System. We did a rapid prototype of the petition forms and worked to get those online and collecting signatures first, then we launched administrative functions in the weeks that followed. Using our Mojo Middleware integration framework, we were able to code and deploy functions in days instead of weeks.

Start to finish we were able to go from discussion to design to launch in under 60 days.

1. Inclusivity – Easy signature collection with responsive and device friendly petitions to ensure wide device compatibility.
2. Integrity – Every capture evaluated in real-time for membership status and signature validation to ensure integrity.
3. Auditability – Electronic browser fingerprints and data collected for every transaction and stored for audit purposes.
4. Compliance – Signatures allocated automatically based on a complex rule set.