Central tabulators

Central tabulators are computers that aggregate election results from multiple individual electronic voting systems. Elections are run across a single jurisdiction (county, city, or town), but the votes are normally cast within a polling place and counted by a machine in that precinct. A central tabulator adds up the results from the individual precincts to produce a jurisdiction-wide result. The election results are transmitted from the precinct voting systems to the central tabulator by removable media (often memory cards) or over a network (such as dial-up or local intranet). For the sake of consistency, central tabulators also tend to be used even when all the votes in a jurisdiction are counted at a central location (like a county election office). Central tabulators nearly always run specialized software tailored to the voting machine in order to upload results, known as the election management system (EMS).