Hi All,

I'm looking to generate some ideas about a business process I'm working on.

My business process is for updating voter record entries in our repository (which we use as our poll book) for an election.  I made a super cool custom button in the repository that launches a form that election judges can use to update the metadata in a voter record entry when that person comes in to vote.  The link in the button pulls in the voter ID number and the document ID number from the metadata and pre-fills those fields in the form.  The election judge will fill in the rest and submit the form, kicking off the workflow.

Here's where I need some ideas: election judges are wonderfully helpful people, but not always the most detail-oriented and also election day is long and tiring.  We need this to be as fool-proof as possible.  If an election judge launches the form without noticing in the metadata that the voter has already voted, the form will overwrite that metadata AND they will be allowing that person to vote a second time.  We would like some kind of alert, giant clue, or prohibition against launching the form in place if the Ballot Return Method field is NOT blank.  I have come up with two ideas.  I'm not in love with either and would welcome any more ideas that you might have!

1.  I could change the form so that it pre-populates ALL the metadata asked for on the form.  If that field is blank in LF, it would be blank on the form.  Hopefully this would be a good clue to the judge that this person has already voted!

Con: this is not an entirely fool-proof clue.  The judge might not get the hint and might still allow that person to vote again.  They could even overwrite the pre-populated data and overwrite the data in that person's voter record entry. 

2.  I could change the workflow so that it does not input the data from the form if the field is not blank in the record. 

Con: this is probably the worse choice of the two.  Though it won't mess up our metadata, the judge doesn't get any clue that they've made an error and the person would still be able to submit a ballot. 

Any other ideas? I would love it if the form would not launch at all if there was something in the Ballot Return Method field or there was some other good alert, but not sure that is possible.