No Chads This Time

YOU MIGHT remember hearing something about the ballots used in Florida for the 2000 election. For one Miami in-plant, that controversy started a chain of events that led to the recent acquisition of a new four-color press.

“After we had hanging chads, we went to electronic voting,” explains Steve Schmuger, graphic services manager for the Miami-Dade County General Services Administration. “There was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the touch-screen voting.”

In fact, the state ordered counties to cast aside their touch-screen machines and return to paper ballots, to be read by optical scanners. Suddenly, this 21-employee in-plant had to produce several million ballots, for both the primary and general elections. This need helped the in-plant justify a brand new four-color Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 74 with a perfector and a coater. It went into operation in late April.

“The capabilities of the press and our experience working with Heidelberg were big factors in our decision to go with the CD 74,” Schmuger says. “It’s working out well.”

The in-plant is currently producing 3.2 million ballots for next month’s election, a task made more difficult because ballots come in 146 different styles, Schmuger says. The ballots will go to about 800 different precincts as well as to absentee voters. (And no, none of the ballots will be of the punch-out variety.)

“With the Heidelberg perfector, what we were able to do is run them two-over-two,” Schmuger says. “We’re able to die-cut in the coating unit.”

The press runs three ballots on a sheet, printing about 15,000 sheets an hour. Ballots are bar coded, to differentiate between the 146 styles. As sheets go through the new Stahlfolder TH 82 folder, the Domino Amjet system reads the codes and verifies the information against a database. Sheets are folded and slit into three ballots. A Heidelberg Speedbander wraps them in bundles of 100, and the Domino system prints an ID label for each paper band.

“Between this primary election and the November general election, we’re going to save the county at least one and a quarter million dollars,” Schmuger contends. And that’s not all. “The new equipment is allowing us to automate more of what we do, and it’s allowing us to become a really green shop.”

An Eye on the Environment

He says environmentally friendly inks and fountain solutions are being used on the press, along with FSC-, SFI- and PEFC-certified papers. What’s more, the shop added a Heidelberg Suprasetter A74 platesetter earlier in the year, which runs Saphira Chemfree thermal plates. This eliminates the need for traditional processing chemistry and reduces waste water.

“More and more of the departments are looking for that,” he explains. “They need to be able to tell the citizens that ‘this is printed in an environmentally friendly way.’ ”

Schmuger plans to move the shop toward FSC certification after the election is over.

Ballots aren’t the only thing this in-plant produces. It prints forms, brochures, books, posters, bills, labels and more. Schmuger says 30 to 40 percent of the work is four-color. The in-plant also does some “heavy duty” variable data printing on its three Kodak Digimaster 150s, such as county tax bills. In addition to printing those bills, the shop produces PDFs of each one for online viewing. Another big variable data job is voter registration books and voter cards for 1.2 million voters. As Schmuger observes: “We do complicated things.”