Elections Ontario (“EO”) is a non-partisan agency of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario working under the direction of the Chief Electoral Officer (“CEO”), an officer of the Legislative Assembly. EO is responsible for conducting general, by-elections and referenda in accordance with the provisions in the Election Act and the administration of Election Finances Act.
This Request for Proposals (“RFP”) is an invitation by the CEO of Elections Ontario to prospective Proponents to submit Proposals for the provision, implementation, integration and configuration and ongoing support and maintenance of a Ticketing Solution, as further described in this RFP.
The duration of the Agreement to be entered into between the CEO and Vendor(s) will be for a period of 3 years, with an option in favour of Elections Ontario to extend the Agreement on the same terms and conditions for up to one (1) additional term of twelve (12) months (“Term”).
The CEO is an independent officer of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario who is responsible, with the assistance of his agency, Elections Ontario, for overseeing the general administration of the voting process in provincial By-Elections and General Elections in accordance with the Election Act and other statutes including the French Language Services Act and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. A Returning Officer is appointed for each Electoral District and, under the direction of the CEO, is the official responsible for conducting an election in an Electoral District, tabulating results, and declaring the winning candidate. There are currently over 10 million eligible electors in the Province of Ontario.
A General Election takes place when the Legislative Assembly is dissolved by the Lieutenant Governor and the electorate across the province votes at the same time for the MPP who will represent each Electoral District in the Assembly. In contrast, a By-Election takes place when, between General Elections, an MPP leaves office and a new MPP must be elected to represent an Electoral District.
Elections Ontario is responsible for administering Events to over 10 million registered electors over an area of 900,000 square kilometers. The province of Ontario is divided into 124 Electoral Districts of approximately 75,000 registered electors, each of which is represented by one elected MPP. When a provincial election is held, an elector casts a vote for a single candidate they would like to serve as their district’s MPP. The political party with the most elected candidates in the province becomes the governing party.
EO invites Proponents to respond to this RFP with Proposals for an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective solution to meet the requirements described herein.
EO is seeking Proposals on a single Ticketing Solution that can provide the following high-level features and functionality:
- Cloud-based, SaaS solution
- Scalable – can support up to 500 or more staff members accessing the ticketing solution at one time
- Secure
- Fully customizable system to meet various business owner requirements
- Customizable Ticket templates and Request templates
- Unlimited SLAs that can be defined based on priority
- Add/modify/delete statuses, types of issues and queues
- Attach files to tickets
- Assign tickets to agents
- Show detailed case log
- Configurable based on individual business unit owner requirements to assign tickets to different queues or sub queues, as required
- Integration with existing EO systems and applications, (both custom and COTS)
- Simple, scalable licensing model that can scale based on EO’s unique business needs
- User friendly, accessible and responsive user interface, across a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices
- Fully accessible with compliance to WCAG 2.0 Level AA Guidelines, at a minimum
- Fully bilingual, supporting both English and French
- Ability for both external and internal stakeholders to create/submit support/incident tickets
- Robust reporting capabilities, including, but not limited to reporting on tickets based on status, issue type, priority, source and queue and the ability to export reports
- Supports notifications, including sending email notifications directly to queue owners when a ticket is assigned, updated, or closed containing all details from the ticket, and sending notifications to submitters of tickets when the status of a ticket changes
- Full administration capabilities for Elections Ontario, including various permission levels for agents and administrators
- Knowledge base functionality, including the ability for public and internal case notes
The full set of documentation required to respond to this RFP may be downloaded from this site.
