Leaving My iHeart in San Francisco

It's been a good day at the Election Center conference in San Francisco, and it's not because of this view from the hotel room.

That's nice, though, and the weather outside is 30 degrees cooler than in Kansas City, so preparing for the Head for the Cure 5k this weekend has been a little easier here than there.

It's also not been a good day just because the Johnson County Election Office received a Best Practices Award.

That was nice, too, though. The award is the Minute Man Award, given for something that can be executed swiftly and cheaply that is repeatable or provides sustained savings.

In our case, this relates to an initiative supporting the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. We provide the League (and other third-party registering groups now) with a secure iPad that they check out and return with proof of citizenship documentation for those they register.

This has been a big deal at naturalization ceremonies and is about as big of a "feel good" story as there can be. More than 600 new citizens have been registered using this iRegister application.

Anything that begins with a lower case "i" is so clever these days, and we have an election worker who came up with "iRegister."

I suggested she trademark it quickly. I think she thought I was kidding, so at least there is a date stamp here with the blog and the award that shows when she first used it. So, intellectual property trolls beware, or she might iSue you.

Our office has been awarded four Best Practice awards by the Election Center in my tenure, equaled only, I believe, by the Los Angeles County Election Office. This one, related to registration, is most special to me because it's truly aligned with an election administration function. Our other awards were for outreach of one type or another--text messaging, a Jo-Co-Po-Lo campaign to direct voters to the proper voting location, and, in life-imitating-art fashion, this very blog.

Even coming from a long Sprint career, I couldn't have anticipated back then how much phones and mobile devices would play a role in my job at the Election Office.

Today, though, I remembered something an advisor told me when we met as I pondered closing that 20-year chapter of my life and exploring something new.

"You'll find, Brian," he said, "that things you've done and learned at Sprint will serve you well."

"He" was Matt Anthony, CEO at the time of VML and now the head of its parent advertising conglomerate. Matt and I knew each other from Sprint, where he worked before going VML, which became our agency of record for the wholesale division. We actually first met before that, when he worked for the Kansas City Comets and I was a pup reporter covering the soccer team for UPI.

Matt also now leads the annual Head for the Cure 5k event (this weekend in Kansas City but not there are several in other communities). He started this event after losing his brother to brain cancer.

The race is now personal for me as well because my daughter had a brain tumor removed and was temporarily unable to move her legs just 6 months before running in the Head for the Cure three years ago. Plus, one of our "A" list election office temporaries also had a brain tumor and has a large team of runners at the event. This will be the fifth race for me (counting one in Lawrence) since my daughter's surgery.

As I ran outside at lunch time along the scenery you've now, um, seen, I was thinking of Saturday's race and drifted off towhat Matt said years ago. I then realized I had one of those "serve you well" moments this morning.

The actual series of events will be in another post, soon (and maybe two or three because of the complexities, all coming within a week), but at a high-level I talked today with a ballot scanning and tabulation company we will be evaluating for several school mail-ballot elections we will have in January.

It was sort of a speed-dating type of meeting. We're going to lay out specs for a scanner and procure one within a month. The company we choose should have some familiarity advantage with us, I would think, as we evaluate next-generation voting systems.

That's the big story in the voting system equipment world--the pending need for new equipment, and the question many of us face is, "what will that system be?"

As I talked today (maybe I should have listened more, but I did listen to myself), I realized that jurisdictions may not replace a system with another system.

What if we had more than one system?

Remember, my time with Matt was when I was over marketing for Sprint Wholesale, a division that sold to other brands. I'm a brand expert, actually, more so than an election expert even.

What if we had, essentially, different brands for different elections? Brands can be vendors or sizes of systems in this case, or just call them models. What if we had small, big, and bigger systems to choose from, based on the election?

We wouldn't have one vendor for everything. I asked if that's ever been done--a jurisdiction having more than election system, for different uses based on the election.

The vendor I was with at that moment suggested that's how things were evolving because of the types of hardware that was being used, less proprietary, more over the counter. I know of all that, of course, but I never saw until today how integrated the election administration industry is about to become.

Mind blown.

THAT'S what made it a good day. There's a new paradigm coming in election administration.

iSaw it and iRegistered it.

Black Cloud Voting

In keeping with recent posts, this will be a yarn again referencing a woman I've never met and a Morrissey song title.

This time, the context is voting equipment.  Or, better said, non-voting equipment used for voting.

It's been two years since I laid claim on this site to a concept I'd been talking about for a while even then:  Bring Your Own Voting Machine (BYOVM).

It's a concept that has taken hold, with many vendors working some solution related to it.

During a meeting with members of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration this past July, I was talking to co-chair Ben Ginsberg about voting equipment.  I began cranking up the first few notes of my BYOVM yarn.

"What if voters could use their smartphones to call up a sample ballot, complete it, and take it in to the polling place to vote," he postulated.

"Well, that's exactly the point of my---," I began before the Commission's senior researcher Nate Persily jumped in.

"They can do that already!" he said.

At that moment, I felt all yarn engines clicking, ready to shout, "Wait, that was my idea!  Let me bore you with why."  

Nate was so wide-eyed and cheery, though, I realized that such a claim would be futile.

It conjured a time when a good friend of mine explained how he came up with the idea of Beanie Babies before Beanie Babies were, well, Beanie Babies.  I believe him.  No one else would.

Likewise, after watching our toddler son drop many pacifiers years and years ago, my wife and I conceived of the Dinky Dunker, some sort of belt contraption with sanitizing liquid that parents could carry, push down the grubby pacifier into it (much like giving a golf ball a wash at the tee), and--pop!--back to the baby's mouth the pacifier would go.  

If someone invents that, ala the Beanie Babies story, remember you read that here first.

(As a secondary yarn, my favorite book of all time, "Competing for the Future," speaks to this a bit, particularly as a reason for not asking customers to define what they want.  Customers will always talk in today's terms, not in terms of a solution to the problem.  You know you've hit on something when it quickly moves from a future idea to a pedestrian yawner like BYOVM is becoming).

So, Thursday we had a vendor come with a demonstration of different voting systems.  Another came Friday.

All of the national talk and recent coverage about nothing being available for the next generation of voting systems may be true but it won't be true much longer.  Voting systems may represent the next innovation explosion.

And, I do believe they all will allow for the incorporation of smart devices.  

I remember years ago how any network connection was taboo in the voting system world. It pretty much still is, but the network is all around us.  Many of these new systems anticipate tentacles into the network.

We live in a connected world and it's unlikely election administration will stay fenced away.  This is a big change coming with the next-generation voting systems.  Network-centric applications in use on election day are inevitable.

I'm not talking online voting, but online administration using systems, for instance, that can report back through the network exactly how many people have voted at any polling place at any given time of the day.  Other metrics can come back, too.  We'll probably have the ability to know how many people have voted in a specific race at any minute.

If a line is mounting somewhere--we will be able to dispatch a field supervisor to check it out before the supervising judge realizes the place is swamped.  It would be the equivalent of a second checker coming up to help before the first looked up to notice the pile-up that everyone in line had been feeling for a few minutes as their ice cream melted.

When the media asks in a few years how things are going out there, we'll be able to call up a dashboard of activity around the county and answer with precision.

Perhaps a new issue won't be that we won't know how many people will have voted when we get that call, but rather what happens when that information is released.  Would that stir or stifle turnout?

Yogi Berra's "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded," could be an unintended consequence of saying with confidence that voting has been heavy.  Explaining that only 10 people have voted in the first hour may take the zest out of others to go vote.  Too much information could become our new problem.

The Internet may not be used to vote, but it's presence will be all around the administration of the election.

That would be scary stuff to Bev Harris, (the woman I haven't met that is the subject of this lead and author of "Black Box Voting.")

It's scary enough to me, too--at least enough to continue in my "Think Like the Jetsons, Live Like the Flintstones" election administration approach.  After all, Johnson County initially modemed election results back from the polls in April 2002, but that concept either wasn't ready for prime time or just wasn't ready.

Either way, it didn't work that well, and any community that hand-transports election results back on election night, like we do, can thank that episode as the reason.

There aren't many royalty-free
options for "black cloud," but
I'm sure you get the idea

So, thinking of that, and for whatever reason continuing to think about Morrissey songs since "Now I Am A Was" rattled through my brain with my post 10 days ago, I realized that the future is less "Black Box Voting,"  and more "Black Cloud Voting."

I don't envision elections as dark and scary, neither Black Box-ey nor Black, uh, Cloudy.

But if activists were concerned with a black box sitting between the voter and results, "To The Cloud," isn't a phrase that will give them comfort.  More and more, networks and data servers of some type will be between the voter and the election office.

I think that's a good thing, at least in the context that we'll have more data, faster, and can provide better service to the voter.

But, jeez, here comes a paradigm shift, lady.

It isn't the underpaid, overworked, and understaffed election offices you'll need to worry about.  It's not the big, bad voting machine companies that could create chaos.  One of them, someday, would like to make a sale.  They might want to sell to more than one customer, in fact, and any kind of network vulnerability is the last thing they'll want.

The new round of vulnerabilities will be what we face daily elsewhere in our lives.  They won't even be tied to voting systems, as much as deceptive tactics or even just fear-factor headlines.

(And, sorry, but let's get real, that's what many of the black-box voting headlines were in the first place.)

For instance, we haven't seen credible cases of iPhone malware, but "mobile hacking threats" has been a topic long enough now that it's actually become tired.

As we move from the simple systems we have today, 1990s technology, to the robust systems of the future, we have to realize that there is a whole large group of ne'er do wells who will see opportunities to disrupt our lives in general and elections, specifically.

They will be able to disrupt simply with claims, the equivalent of technology bomb-threats.  They will disrupt with fake attempts to make people, outside of our systems, think they are voting when they aren't.

All this comes with the move to newer technology that we all know is on the horizon.

This phenomena can't be new.  In its own way, technology changes in each cycle led to similar but more primitive worries.

In fact, "Black Box Voting" gives us a good feel for reactions the last time voting systems amped up.  Many of us were not in election administration then, but we know we'll need to be wide-eyed on all fronts as we introduce new technology.

Yes, this yarn has a point--several of them, in fact:

• Election systems (not just voting systems) are about to see their moment of innovation.
• We've seen pile-on innovation in other industries, and I really believe that if you're an IT developer, elections is going to be a fun place to be over the next few years.
• Election offices are going to be more IT-centric.  We're already seeing this, and I predict more than half of election office staff members will be IT-oriented within 5 years.
• We will need to give a growing amount of mindshare to blocking out new threats.  Election administrators are good at creating security procedures, but we will be spending more time going down what we hope will be blind alleys just to demonstrate that there is no vulnerability.
• That's because we are about to emerge into a world that simply can't ignore the connected world.  At some point, election administrators will be chastised for not connecting systems, as opposed to today's world where that practice is applauded.

It circles back to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and their report.  This is the first of two posts related to the voting system recommendations.  

This post is more to acknowledge that we're not just facing the need for a new voting system in Johnson County.  That system will be the catalyst for a whole new way of operating, in ways we can't yet foresee but will be expected to foresee before we spend any money.

The second post will focus on the financial side.  So, that's my blogging homework assignment, to tap out part two.

And that brings a whole 'nother definition of "Black Cloud."  More soon.

Bowser the Elusive

Amidst all of the talk of a next-generation voting system and the possibility of my idea of "Bring Your Own Voting Machine," we at the Election Office recently have been having a rather contrarian thought.

What if we simply recommitted to using the voting machines we have for a long time?

"Long time" may not be until the the 12th of Never, but longer than four more years.

Our machines are running on late 1990s technology and many have been in service for 10 years.  The touchscreen capability is four-wire resistive, much more primitive than the iPads and Android tablets of today.

We've provided specific cost estimates for the capital budget, for three years straight, for a scanner-based system and a voting machine system using what's certified today without being able to get them into the county capital budget plan (actually they were in and then taken out this past year).  The cost for each system is comparable, in excess of $10 million.

The argument for taking the dollars out of the budget shifts.  In general, the uncertainty of the Election Assistance Commission, certification in general, and the potential for the crazy new system I've raised seems to give enough cover for those who don't want to do anything to not do anything.

We're coming to the next capital budgeting process with a spiffy PowerPoint and a process that allows us to create a Request for Proposal with vendor input and analyze all solutions--including those not certified--before determining the right course.  We know, however, that if we had to make a decision today that we would pick a system like the one we already have costed and provided to the county.

I fully expect that during that time we will be told the equivalent of, "Good process, Mario--but our princess is another castle!"

No matter.  Kansas statutes direct the Election Commissioners to print the ballots (which includes voting machines and tabulation systems) and to annually provide a budget to conduct the election and that the county commissioners shall provide funding.

That's not really an optional thing (hence the word "shall") and one day, despite my requests for the last four years that the quotes I've provided be used for the budget, if the millions of dollars we will need are not baked into the budget, they still will need to be spent.

Bowser, eventually, will be defeated and the princess will be saved.

The big risk of delaying is that we've seen previous versions of voting machines have parts that fail, and fail quickly.  Power supplies and printers are the usual suspects.

We also know, though, that being the new kid on the block to be the first to pressure-test a new system has significant risks (Johnson County lived this in 2002 when it became the first county to try to modem results from the polls).

We further know that two vendors have many new and slightly new voting machines in the same model we have (and the one quoted for the new system that we have frequently submitted for the capital budget).

We can get more of them.  We also could got some that have been mothballed in other states, although I believe they have limited value.  We once bid one cent for 500 voting machines in Cuyahoga County and were rejected.

I think that was a fair bid.  We were willing to pay for the transportation, but the machines hadn't been used for a while.  Eventually, that county will have to pay to dispose those machines, much the way I will have to pay to remove my once-cool large screen television from my basement, and having someone take them off their hands at no expense will look like an obvious good deal they passed up.

So "doing nothing" has some intrigue.  We still have to push to get the new system budgeted, but the very idea to type this post likely will provide fodder to again not put our request in the budget.  (Again, this continual ostrich strategy won't eliminate the eventual need).

But I know how new systems will be.  Give a mouse a cookie--or a software developer a project--and just imagine the new ways new technology can slow things down.

Machines will take longer to boot.  Ballots, with the ability to be rendered more user-friendly, will be in color, maybe with a cute splash screen and a logo.

We might see the candidates' photos.  You might have the chance to watch yourself virtually walk up to the candidate and, for instance in a primary, make your selection by pinning the tail on the donkey or the trunk on the elephant of your choice.

Mark my words--it will take longer for a voter to cast a ballot on the systems under development than it does with the systems today.

And that's the beauty of the contrarian idea.  Our machines are the equivalent of that first Nintendo system of the late 1980s.

The graphics are minimal by today's standards, but there was only an A and a B button back then.  ("And that's the way we liked it!")

There was no R or L, X or Y, circle or square, and no gesture.  Madden 2014 looks like the real football game, but it was more fun to rake up 10 sacks a game in Tecmo Bowl where the big graphical push was that the players' uniforms were the correct colors for the NFL teams.

The point of all of this is way back to an earlier post when I played up a great book, Crunch Mode.  John Boddie's words of becoming comfortable working with a system that isn't developed apply to all things strategic.

We have different lanes we're managing, and truly strategic thinkers understand that monitoring several lanes to make the proper decision is necessary.

Not to be all Ferris Buehler here, but I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Voting system design is now a forever thing.  If the cliche "success is a journey, not a destination," is true, the same can be said for voting systems design.  It's a journey. 

I've been saying that here for nearly two years. It's the equivalent of living today simultaneously like it's the last day of your life and with the thought that you'll live forever.

Bowser won't live forever.  But, maybe, a slow pursuit gets us to the Bring Your Own Voting Machine castle that we never would have entered otherwise.

Terrible Idea? So You're Saying There's a Chance!

I have my own voting machine.

Okay, I don't really, but I might.

You might, too.

For nearly three years, I've taken the spin on "BYOD" (Bring Your Own ((Mobile)) Device) to what I've called Bring Your Own Voting Machine.

BYOVM isn't as catchy as BYOD.  In fact, BYOVM makes BYOD seem catchy.

But, it's my thing.  I wrote about it here, just to document that I'd been thinking about it for quite a while.

Last week, I started thinking about innovative ways to deal with lines and I wondered if there was a way to pre-qualify voters.  The notion of "pre-qualify" seems rather odd, I know, because voting is a constitutional right.  Citizens are pre-qualified by breathing.

But what could constitute something that said, "I'm good to go!" when coming into the polling place?  Really, verification that the voter is registered and at the correct polling place is the answer.  It's not much more complicated than that, although such a thing would reduce the bottleneck at polling places.

That's not earth-shattering, but it would form the foundation of a smartphone app.  Many election offices either have launched some sort of app or are planning to do so.

But when discussing this at an industry meeting recently, someone carried it further.

Could that app have a sample ballot?

Sure, I said.  In fact, I think we should think of this app like a concierge service (again, something I recently typed here).

Could it allow the voter to print off the sample ballot as a ballot and cast it?

"Well, now you are getting into my thoughts of Brrrrrrr....," I began to say before being interrupted.

"They do that already," someone else said, matter-of-factly.

And, quickly the conversation picked up elsewhere.

But, wait.  I pulled it back.

Whoa, whoa, whoa--who are THEY and what do THEY do?

The company, as explained to me, was Everyone Counts, famous for star power it has attracted to join the company and for star power in dealing with the Academy Awards.

I met with Everyone Counts about this very topic more than an year ago.  I also met with other companies and spilled my same vision.

As I've said, I want to shift the cost of voting machines to the voters.  That's not because I have it out for voters--I am a voter, after all--but voting machines are expensive, and they bring security and chain of custody concerns.

What if, instead of buying voting machines, we have technology that allows persons with a smart device the ability to pull up a ballot at the polling place?  Half of the adults in the United States have smartphones today and more than 1/3 have tablet devices.

And that's today.  We're talking about the time we need a new system in Johnson County--2017.  What if, just like the IRS transferred the cost of producing publications to taxpayers who now buy tax software, we could avoid a $12 million short-lived expense of new voting machines by using devices that already are in everyone's hands?

If there is any way to do this, we will.  And that's what I told Everyone Counts.  And, ES&S.  And, that's what I told Unisyn when I met with a friend from that company on Friday.  My wife has two little dogs who hear this story daily, in fact.

I know this idea has legs because every time it comes up, there seems to be a natural conclusion of, "that's being done already."

At a conference on disabilities and voting I attended last year, we had breakout sessions to discuss the future of voting and each team came back with some version of the Bring Your Own Voting Machine Concept.

The New York Times ran a blog piece last year on this topic and quoted someone saying it was a terrible idea.  I took that as progress that this really can happen.

Good ideas anticipate user needs where users see a solution and immediately say, "Finally!" although they never articulated the need before.  Focus groups alert companies to what users want today, in today's terms.  As election administrators, we need to think ahead of that framework.

Think back to the early days of iTunes, or the first time you saw your order typed back at you on a fast-food drive through, or the giant Post-It Note whiteboard sheets that don't require pins or tape when putting them up throughout the room during a planning meeting.

To a large degree, these things were met with a mix of "Eureka!" and a yawn.  Often users know what they want when they see it before they can say what they want.

Our college intern is making progress at mapping out our process to pursue a next-generation voting system and we are borrowing (stealing) liberally from Los Angeles County and Travis County.  We hope to have his early version complete by mid-August.

Whenever we issue a Request for Proposal (probably two years from now), it will have requirements to support the BYOVM concept.  Respondents won't be eliminated if they can't support the solution, but it's very likely the final solution will incorporate this concept.

At this pace, though, by then, it will be as commonplace as seeing my order typed back to me at the Wendy's drive-through.

Future = Present

I'm so mad at my mother.

Or, so goes the beginning of a joke on the "Let's Get Small" album by Steve Martin.

"I don't know," he says, "she calls me up the other day.  She wants to borrow ten dollars for some food!  Can you believe that?  I said, 'Hey! I work for a living.'"

I thought of that in part because yesterday was Mother's Day but mostly because that sentiment sums up how I felt when leading a panel on The Future of Elections at the Kansas Clerks conference in Manhattan this past week.

I'm so mad at The Future of Elections....

Better said, I'm tired of the Future of Elections.

I feel like we've collectively dilly-dallied talking about the future for a few years now and, gee, the future is here.

The Future Is Now!

That's not really an inspirational message.  It's a signal of a crisis.

This is the front of the t-shirts our
high-school election workers wore
in 2012.

Those voting machines that we think will need to be retired after 2016's presidential election?  In some circles, politically at least, the 2016 election is "on."  2016 is essentially here.

Heck, in the budget world, the 2014 budget is nearly locked in Johnson County.  The next budget for discussion really is the 2015 budget.  We found out about a $30,000 cost surprise last week at the conference for 2014, so we're already in the hole next year.

The future is encircling us.  I've seen the future in this case and it looks a lot like the present, only with even fewer resources.

Every year when we talk about the daunting issues surrounding certification of new voting systems, the complexity leads the capital budget team to consider not doing anything until things appear more certain.

A year later, and a year closer to the future present, the budget boulder becomes bigger.  We've advocated for a couple of years to at least put into the budget a replacement system just like what we have now (and if that doesn't spell the future is now, what does?), hoping we'll push the needle on our "Bring Your Own Voting Machine" concept I explained here more than a year ago.  If so, the financial need will be much less but, if not, we're covered financially.

We're closely following Los Angeles County's process to look at a new voting system and plan to emulate the community input and ideation process.  That's easier typed than done, though, because we barely have the headcount at our office to conduct the current elections, let alone think about the future ones.

And that's the rub.  In our case, "Dilly-dallied," is a harsh descriptor because we simply don't have the resources we need to operate.  The 2012 election emphasized that we are one untimely illness or staff member departure from failure.  We requested the replacement of two positions cut during our budget downturn in 2010 and money to replace our 1990s-based election management system that hasn't been supported since 2005.

We're likely to get neither request funded.  Without elections, there is no government, but government budget priorities don't always align with core and essential services.

One clear thing is that the future of elections will be much, much more expensive.  From postage to rent to training to facilities to simple increases in election worker pay (ours haven't had an increase in 8 years), the cost increase will be as dramatic as moving from a fully-depreciated 20-year-old Suburu to to a modest new Prius.  Any car payment, when one hasn't been paid for 20 years, will seem like sticker shock.

I think election administrators often have stayed silent about these realities.  That's not happening in the industry now, although little seems to be changing.

I wasn't around pre-2000, but I wonder if one of the root causes that led to a national financial upgrade on voting systems was that loyal government employees didn't stress the need for investment back then.     Or, and more likely, they were ignored.  Under-funded was business as usual.

It's possible that part of the future of elections is that all the 2000s will have done is raise expectations for elections without an equal increase in investment.  I often hear in this industry that sufficient funding never finds its way to the front lines until something goes wrong.

What a way to live--akin to one of my favorite song titles ever, by Panic at the Disco:  "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage."

Make it happen with unreasonably few resources or fail and we'll give the resources to your replacement.  Many of our predecessors in the election administration industry lived that life for years and that's our future unless we accept and proclaim the urgency of the present.

Another favorite quote of mine is from Stephen Covey:  "Nothing fails like success."  The key to the future is accepting that we face a crisis in election administration unless a myriad of things are addressed.  This will become a major theme of this blog over the next few months as our staff begins to tactically address the future, er, the present of elections.