Motels and Mules

This post is full of confessions.

First, I confess to not seeing the new documentary, 2000 Mules. 

I say this because I believe many people are speaking about the movie but also have not been willing to pay $19.99 to rent or $29.99 to buy the movie.  I suspect many who speak about the movie also have not actually watched the movie, although they may not be as forthright as me.

(I’ve seen one person who says this movie is “proof positive the 2020 election was stolen,” but whom I doubt has seen it, actually post a “See it Free” link, but the link doesn’t lead to anyone seeing it for free.” The trailer plays, and then the viewer is led to a paywall).

Still, we are a society on the go, so actually seeing a movie these days isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to reviewing a movie.  I’ve seen the trailer and the documentary videos about the movie. 

2000 Mules is cinematic portrayal of findings by the leaders of “True the Vote.”  I know plenty about True the Vote but my latest experiences with True the Vote have come from numerous open records requests they have made of North Dakota in the past two years.  These requests have been similar, and involved voter registration, which North Dakota does not have. 

That makes sense.  In fairness, the organization isn’t called True the Registration, or True the Voter.  Apparently, only the vote is in their truth wheelhouse.

2000 Mules reminds me of the movie 200 Motels by Frank Zappa.  I’m a Zappa fan, but like 2000 Mules, 200 Motels is an often-discussed-but-seldom-seen movie.  It’s a classic movie, but also one I have never seen.  I have the soundtrack, though.  (Zappa is long-dead but I suspect he knew as much about North Dakota voters as True the Vote).

According to Wikipedia, 200 Motels has been “dubbed a ‘surrealistic’ documentary.”

I assume the same can be said for 2000 Mules.

The premise of 2000 Mules comes down to the belief that ballot drop boxes stole the 2020 presidential election.  The dropboxes enabled ballots to be deposited and later counted, and apparently, the maker of 2000 Mules thinks counting ballots is evil.

True the Vote purchased location data tied to cellphones and created intricate backstories of how people crossed paths with dropboxes in five key swing states in the 2020 election.  This location data is combined with some security video showing people putting ballots in the dropboxes, sometimes as the dropboxes were overflowing, and ballots fell to the ground.  This juxtaposition apparently creates some sort of evil narrative.

You know how accurate location data is on your cell phone—Google tells me that I visited a water park 100 times last winter.  (That’s half of 200 Motels!)  Yet, I’ve never been to the water park.

I actually drove by it on my way to the gym down the road.  However, I’ve never been at that gym, so says Google. 

True the Vote claims that this data and images in five swing states prove that the wrong presidential candidate was elected.  Like 200 Motels, though, the storyline just shows unconnected nonsense vignettes, (so says Wikipedia of the Zappa movie).

In fact, while discussing how evil it is that these dropboxes have been fed ballots, the video supposedly raises the concern with the security of the dropboxes, essentially also suggesting that ballots could be taken from the boxes.  Again, unconnected nonsense.

The Associated Press did a good job pointing out that the movie stumbles.  Others have as well, and the very people that the movie is hoping to reach—media pundits—haven’t embraced the movie.  Beyond that, if the facts were so telling, and this was such a bombshell discovery, exactly why would that lead the creators to take several months and create a movie to make money, as opposed to exposing crimes to law enforcement?

The creators claim they did approach authorities and couldn’t get traction.  My suspicion is that no traction was gained because, at the AP says, nothing was proven.

My further suspicion is that the producers saw the money and a willing audience of pillow huggers who would applaud their actions and conclusions without really digging into facts.  It’s akin, in my view, to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting in the early 2000s. Once she had an HBO documentary, “Hacking Demoracy,” in 2006, her profile suddenly was nowhere to be found.  In fairness, she at least made her book available for free, to generate interest.  True the Vote, again, isn’t really True the Marketing.

(Bev Harris also was referenced as a grandmother.  Frank Zappa brought with him the Mothers of Invention.  Portraying yourself as a parent or grandparent is always a good marketing move when questioning elections.  The True the Vote leaders are married but whether or not they have any kids is not…..wait for it….apparent).

Fact is, dropboxes didn’t swing the election, at least the way the creators say.  The fact that communities across the country used private funds to install dropboxes didn’t make dropboxes evil.

While we are making confessions, I must confess that I am not necessarily a fan of dropboxes.  I do believe election offices should have night drops, but dropboxes have become a broad term ranging from night drops at the election office to remote ballot drop-off locations.  Somehow, dropboxes have emerged as yet another political wedge topic, where the Left feels dropboxes represent a constitutional right and the Right, well, actually read the Constitution.

As a local election official, I saw the value of having a 24-hour ballot drop off at our office.  People forget to mail ballots and bring them close to election day, and others feel more secure knowing the ballot was received.  They also don’t trust that the United States Postal Service will competently get their ballot delivered on time, and, as you can search and read in this blog, who would?

We are used to seeing several dropboxes in our everyday life.  They are blue, unattended, and at many street corners.  Older readers might reference these dropboxes by a different name--mailboxes.

Letters often are shoved into these mailboxes and then left unattended for hours before one official comes and recovers the contents, with no check and balance of another employee from another political party in attendance.

What I do like about the notion of election dropboxes is the implied confession, at least an admission, that this whole nationwide Vote At Home push is too much for the United States Postal Service to handle.  The dropboxes provide more assurance than the USPS that the ballots will actually be delivered correctly and expeditiously.  The USPS simply can’t handle the volume of mail that comes from nationwide voting.  Those who say otherwise likely could create a different organization than the creators of this video, perhaps naming themselves False the Vote.

The same people pushing voting at home pushed the dropboxes.  The same people who stress to you that vote by mail is safe and secure, and who tell you that election mail is just a tiny amount of the overall mail, also push dropboxes.  Remember those public service announcements from the USPS that said you must mail Christmas cards by December 15 to ensure they arrive by Christmas?

(One of the great things about the USPS and vote-by-mail, Dear Reader, is that, as evidenced by the question above without a typed answer, often the jokes write themselves).

But back to True the Vote’s problem with dropboxes.

I’ve tried 200 times—nay, 2000 times—but confess to not knowing their point. 

Is it that ballots were delivered?

It is that someone went and gathered ballots on behalf of voters to make sure the voters’ ballots were received?  They could have done this with stamps and a blue postal drop box. 

(And, in reality, the ballots likely would have arrived without a stamp; that’s a little piece of election mail regulations most people don’t know.  The USPS is required to deliver those ballots and charge the election office for postage).

Does True the Vote actually have proof that ballots were prepared illegally?  That seems to be the truth that needs to be sought.

In North Dakota, no one can get a ballot without an application.  The application requires proof of residency and proof of identity, and includes a signature requirement.  The ballots, once issued and returned, contain a place for the voter to sign, and these two signatures are compared.

Vote-by-mail state laws aren’t identical, but they are very similar in most states.  Some states issue mail ballots to all voters, but those are vote-by mail states on the West Coast.  Nearly all states require an application first, and signatures and other identifying information are verified North Dakota has famously been in the news lately for strictly following signature comparisons.

Maybe people who have seen the movie will be able to properly explain the conclusion we are to be left with.  For now, it appears to simply be, “Dropboxes are bad.”

If so, I suspect history will long remember 200 Motels over 2000 Mules.

Is There a Card for Happy Election Day?

This is a brief interruption from addressing the local impact of the recommendations from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA).

Well, sort of, anyway.

This takes us back to what is the most frequently posted topic--the United States Post Office.

We're mailing out ballots for next week's Prairie Village primary and getting some back without issue, so that's good.

The post office is closed today for President's Day and a couple of things are top of mind with the Postal Service, not the least of which come from an article in yesterday's Kansas City Star. 

I'm not sure why I never made the Kansas City connection between Hallmark and that company's interest in stopping Saturday mail delivery.  Hallmark, as you'll see in the article, even has a United States Senator on the case.

But then, one of our state's United States Senators, Pat Roberts, was equally engaged in listening to the PCEA's recommendations last week before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.  He's the minority leader of that committee.

The Committee also was expected to vote on the nominations of two members of the Election Assistance Commission, but the Committee didn't have a quorum for such a vote.

There likely is a good reason of which I'm not aware for the lack of quorum.  There might be two or three very good reasons.

Still, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that when the PCEA spoke to arguably the Senate committee that would be most interested in the findings, only four senators were present.

My role with the PCEA recommendations, I've decided, is to link those to needs in our operations.  That's what I've started to do here and have several  posts to go on that.

Last week, I recommended locally through testimony on a bill in committee at the Kansas House of Representatives that the bill considering moving spring elections to the fall in odd-numbered years also include a requirement that schools have an in-service day for November elections.  I cited the PCEA study as part of that testimony.

I don't know how much play the recommendations will get, but I want to know I exhausted ways that this tool (the PCEA report) can help our voters.  Hence, the series of posts.

A big component of those recommendations involve advance voting, something Johnson County has done very well.  Part of that, though, requires continued use of the Postal Service, and I was encouraged to see Hallmark Cards pushing for continued "full" postal service.

I'm not being cynical, just a realist--we may have more success with a company like Hallmark pushing postal issues than we might on our own.

I'm continually baffled, though, why the only public-facing solution to the Postal Service's woes is elimination of Saturday delivery.  The shrink-to-grow business model rarely works.

In fact, the Postal Service saw an 8 percent revenue increase in its most recent fiscal year and still had a net loss of $5 billion.

Much of the problem is being pinned on postal health and retirement benefits, and I can't speak to that enough to say with certainty that's wrong.   It's a contributor, but continuous $5 billion losses defy logic.  If any of us were the chief executive officer of the Postal Service, we would be exactly that--among the "were."

None of us would be retained as the head of an outfit that continually lost billions while we walked around with our hands in the air blaming the system. 

Consider that since 2005, when I came into this job, first-class postage has risen from 37 cents to 49 cents, a 32 percent increase.

And, that hasn't been enough to fix things.

Eliminating 16.7 percent of the delivery days doesn't seem like that would be enough, either.  How could anyone with a straight face say so?

Postage is our greatest expense after staff salaries and ahead of election worker expenses.  Yet, half of our elections in that period have been mail-ballot elections despite the increases in postage. The postage increases haven't decreased the interest in mail-ballot elections nor tipped us to the point that building a larger facility for in-person advance voting is more cost-effective than continuing to use the mail for nearly half of our advance voters.

Maybe the Postal Service should look at responsive pricing, similar to baseball teams.  Games against the Yankees or on weekends, for instance, cost more here.  Maybe another twist to tiers of pricing is a premium paid for Saturday delivery.

The flaw in that theory, of course, is that if a truck drives past four homes to deliver mail to one, the truck still drove past all five homes.

Another option would be for the Postal Service to be privatized or treated like a utility with a rate of return allowed.

Something has to be done. 

Or, not, maybe.   If continued $5 billion losses aren't affecting change, maybe we'll stay on this path for several years.

At some point, though, revenues have to match the costs.  If we ride Hallmark's lobbying coattails, maybe the only things traveling through the mail will be items when the senders care to send the very best.

Here's hoping that the "very best" includes ballots.

Out = Green, In = Yellow

Tuesday was an election day.

In fact, it was the biggest mail-ballot election in Johnson County's history.  The election involved a tax-issue in Overland Park and the turnout was pretty low, actually, at about 30 percent.

This was a renewal of a tax passed in 2008 and the turnout then was 35 percent.  Mail-ballot turnouts, in the 50s ten years ago, rarely reach that point anymore.  Most mail-ballot turnouts in Johnson County begin with a "4."

Sadly, some spring primary polls elections have had turnouts that began with a "4" and were specifically followed by the period above, as in 4 percent.  Our snow-primary last February had a 4.5 percent turnout, but a comparable primary in February 2011, with good weather, was at 5.4 percent.

Olathe ballots, queued, ready to travel from Washington
to Kansas City next week.

But, that's a different post!

Here, we're pushing on out the green envelopes, preparing for the canvass next Monday and then, one week later, on come the yellow envelopes of the Olathe mail-ballot election.

The election is for a similar tax issue and also very large--about 80,000 voters.

On the heels of that (or somewhere actually in the middle of the shoe) comes the Roeland Park mail-ballot election in December.  That's smaller, but overseas and military ballots will be going out in that election just as Olathe's ballots are hitting the traditional mail.

Things have improved, by the way, with the Olathe Post Office.  We've actually been getting separate ballot deliveries in the mornings now.

And, if there is any question that people other than election geeks read this blog, the leasing agent for Westbrooke Village, the subject of the last post, finally called us back.

The Dallas connection is gone.  That leasing group went bankrupt.  And what a shock it was to hear that!

Anyway, there is movement afoot to prepare the property for a sale so there is little interest in leasing to anyone for anything.  There may be a chance, though, and we'll be bird-dogging it.

For now, if it's Wednesday, we must be working on Olathe.

Olathe Post Office Woes, Continued

Yesterday, I blogged about the number of undeliverable ballots involved in the Overland Park mail-ballot election.

In today's morning mail, we received 1,997 more undeliverable ballots, bringing the total to more than 6,000, out of about 111,000 mailed.

That's not the lead here, though.

We also received one voted ballot.

Yes, one.

With 111,000 ballots mailed, and at least 100,000 arriving to valid households, with about 5,000 back through Friday, only one came through over the weekend.

Really.

I offer this as People's Exhibit A why the rhetoric espoused at the federal level by the Postal Service doesn't equal the service level on the ground.

I emailed our contact in Kansas City.  To everyone's surprise but mine, the Olathe Post Office made a special second delivery this afternoon of more than 7,000 voted ballots.

With the election ending at noon, if this had been election day, that's 7,000 voters at risk thanks to our Post Office.  Our tracking capability to assertively claim that we know ballots are "in the building," can't come soon enough.  Again, we should have it by the time we start the Olathe mail-ballot election next month.

At least we avoided the Olathe Post Office on the way out :-) 

There Are Returned Ballots, and Then There Are "Returned" Ballots

Our Overland Park mail-ballot election--the biggest mail-ballot election in the county's history--is underway!

The process, utilizing Pitney Bowes in Kansas City and bypassing the Olathe Post Office to send the ballots, has been incredibly better than our experience the last time (2008) we had an Overland Park mail-ballot election.

I couldn't take photos at Pitney Bowes on Monday because of their own security, but here are some of the pallets awaiting shipment from Washington state, where we have them printed by ES&S.  Once arrived at Kansas City, they were sorted by zip code and prepared to be taken to the Kansas City Post Office Tuesday night, and voters began receiving their ballots Wednesday morning.

By law, the ballots couldn't begin being received by voters until Wednesday.

We have another large mail-ballot election, in Olathe, on the heels of this one, and beginning with that election, we'll have a tracking system in place so that we will know when ballots are at the Olathe Post Office, awaiting delivery to us.  That has been an issue, where we have been told by the Post Office that they had no ballots on a Tuesday morning, only to find that they actually had a few hundred but simply hadn't counted them yet.

Ballots were mailed Tuesday night, began being received Wednesday, and by Friday, we had 10,151 ballots returned.

However, of the those, 5,994 were returned by the voter as voted ballots.  4,157 were returned as undeliverable.

"Returned" ballots.  Green envelopes are
returned, voted ballots.  White envelopes
are returned as undeliverable.  Ballots
cannot be forwarded.

This means that of the 111,069 ballots issued, 3.7 percent represented voters who have moved just since March.

That's when we mailed postcards to each voter and began working those that came back undeliverable.  Those voters became "inactive," where they sit unless we get a good address and updated registration or until they haven't voted in both the 2014 or 2016 federal election.  At that point, if they are still inactive in December 2016, they can be removed.

Mail-ballot elections only send ballots to active voters in Kansas, so none of those returned were already in inactive status.

Using the 3.7 percent as a swag and recognizing that it's been only six month since the postcard, it's fair to think that at least 7 percent of voters move without updating their registration annually.  With 370,000 registered voters, beyond those we know are inactive, that's about another 26,000 who, theoretically, will have moved and not updated their registration in a 12-month period.

This is especially complicated for a county like Johnson County, which sits on a state line.  Many of these voters likely will have moved to Missouri.  In fact, that also complicates the issue of the voters in suspense status who have registered but not yet provided proof of citizenship.  Some of those voters, nine months into the implementation of the law, have likely by now moved out of state and will remain in that suspense status indefinitely.

There has to be a better way of managing the voter rolls.  In fact, there are better ways.

That sentence was intended to say that there HAS to be a better way, meaning implementing the better way may be one way out of that continuing War on the Voter that we fight as polling places are eliminated, advance voting sites are difficult to find, and the mail service--without the crafty end run we just did for Overland Park--continues to be a worry.

Both the PEW Center for the States and the Kansas Secretary of State testified on this issue Friday to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

What was done after the Help America Vote Act, to create statewide voter registration systems, should be amped up, in my opinion.  I sat next to one of the co-chairs of the Commission during a meeting in early July and he had a keen interest in the solutions implemented by PEW and the state of Kansas.

PEW's solution is a comprehensive voter registration system that incorporates several databases.  Kansas has agreements with nearly half of the states in the country to compare voter registration lists and remove duplicates.

I'm hoping that because this issue seemed to be burning since at least early July with the Commission, some tangible change may result, perhaps in the year or two after the recommendations are made (by December).

One nationwide voter registration system may be too much to undertake politically, but it would go a long way to keeping us from putting an asterisk after the definition of "returned ballots."  It may also be a gateway to more innovative voting methods, such as allowing voters to call up and cast their unique ballots anywhere in a state or even anywhere in the country.

For now, we'll take the short-term win.  For Overland Park, thanks to sweat on the backs of many at ES&S, Pitney Bowes, the U.S. Post Office (our guy on the case in Kansas City), and our own employees at the Election Office, this election has started off very smoothly.

In the News

I was a newshound even as a kid so I enjoyed the Kansas City Star's Mini Page and actually liked CBS's "In the News" segments on Saturdays.

This is a post in that spirit.

First, this past week, this very blog was awarded an industry Best Practice by the Election Center. My hometown paper even picked up the press release.

As gratifying as that was, my bigger observation was that of the six Best Practice awards given by the Association in 2013, two were related to tablet computers. And, not just any tablet computers: they utilized iPads.

Our office had already received a "Bright Ideas" award this year from Harvard University for our use of iPads at the polls.

These are devices that have been around only for about 40 months and now are a major piece of our culture. A minor piece of my spirit was bitten off last year by our county manager's office for equipping our employees with iPads during the presidential election cycle, but I knew it was the right decision and now most of our staff (and many knowledge workers in government and business) can't imagine working without them.

As evidenced by the innovative awards and uses--as well as the increase of electronic poll book use--iPads, and tablets in general, are obviously now a visible cog in the innovation cycle in elections and government.

When looking at the future uses of iPads, that consideration abruptly leads to Android tablets, which collectively outnumber iPads. In fact, (and I saw this again and again when I was at Sprint) companies have a way of gravitating to their natural market position, and it's very likely the iPad will become, over time, the niche player in tablets in much the same way the Mac is still a niche player in computers.

The Wall Street Journal recently postulated what that might mean for Apple. iPads could be the Blackberry devices of this decade, virtually gone by 2020. It's an important consideration, especially as tablet devices worm their way into more parts of the election process.

That's a whole 'nother post later, but a factor that will come into play with our next-generation voting system analysis.

Also in the Wall Street Journal was a recent update on the United States Postal Service's money woes. Since 2005, the article points out, first-class mail has declined by approximately 30 percent.

By comparison, in 2005, we sent out 85,000 first-class mail-ballots and this year will be sending approximately 300,000.  That's about a 250 percent increase.  Our communities are business-development engines for the Post Office in a time when the postal service is compressing.

If there is ever a living example of "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," it's the postal service. In fact, I think the postal service is in a fiddle jam session with the newspaper industry.

Maybe Amazon's Jeff Bezos will try to buy the postal service. There is a huge piece of synergy there.

Point is, everyone seems to see only one path for the postal service--reduced service and some sort of government bailout.  It's interesting that no one sees a path where the postal service succeeds.  Even the postal service doesn't see that path, although in meetings often I hear them say that they think they are succeeding today.  (Charlie Sheen's "Winning" comes to mind).

What if there is another path?  What if the postal service is privatized?  One way to improve the postal model is to make it market-driven.  The postal service already is the last mile often for Amazon, even though the packages go out through UPS.  It's possible that a shift in focus, and better management, could change things dramatically.

Short of that, I'm continually amazed at how a business can be in such a tailspin and either seem oblivious or unwilling to actually correct the course. You'd think the postal service would have sales managers regularly calling on communities that regularly have mail-ballot elections, or an aggressive vertical marketing campaign directed at elections.

The postal service does spend money on advertising, but those marketing efforts are very unfocused and likely do not provide a good, um, return.

Lastly in the news this week is an article related to the new health care exchanges and voter registration.

This article, to me, is less important than the secondary issue that comes to mind.

We live in an age where various government entities touch us in a largely uncoordinated fashion. Yet, many of these--as stated in the article--are supposed to work together on our behalf. That doesn't work out well.

In Kansas, we're dealing with registration issues because we aren't receiving paperwork from the driver's license bureau, and data supports that this is something nearly every state sees except for Michigan, where the driver's license bureau and voter registration line up under one state officer.

I get the concerns in light of the recent NSA privacy concerns, but I think voters would benefit, for instance, with the Michigan model or even something more far-reaching.   For instance, if an identity card will be needed for a health care exchange, I think there is great value in considering one state officer in charge of "identity management."

Again, I know how creepy that phrase seems. But, imagine having one place to take care of your interactions with government, at least at a state level.

Often I hear of government conspiracies and I have to point out to the person raising the issue that, based on my nine years in government, my observation is that government isn't smart enough to pull off a conspiracy.

However, a big reason they believe conspiracy theories is the notion that there is one government, not separate city, school, state, county, and federal governments.

Further, citizens don't understand why they have to provide the same information to several agencies.  It's akin to being asking for your credit card number when you finally get to a live customer service agent at Visa, even though you entered it already once on your phone.

This has come up, in different ways, at a couple of meetings I've been to recently, and I think there are some creative ways to address this, even without reorganizing.  But they all require the "give a darn meter" to be raised with officials who are as incentivized to do so as the postal service leadership is to improve the postal service's financial performance.

Harkening back gain to my Sprint days, when the market landscape changed, three things would happen:  AT&T would change its price, MCI would change its marketing message, and Sprint would reorganize.

This almost ensured we would remain number three in the market, but the inward focus also addressed customer service issues.  A customer once said, "You guys treat customer service like an art."  That's how we felt, too.

(By way, he was talking about large business support, not what we would see later--and what I believe is being fixed--on the consumer wireline side).

I think states that organize around the citizen, with a single person accountable for records, would feel the payoff.  I know our office would.

Postal End-Run

I am a smidge worried, as the new-found election blogger and all, that I've drifted a bit from my mission.

I did say this blog will have a point of view, and it's had one lately, but the true purpose of the blog was to give insight into the day-to-day aspects of election administration.

So, this brief post comes back to that.  If you've been reading lately, it would be hard not to notice my disdain for our local post office, and this post happily points out that we may have an end-run around that.

First, let me reinforce that we found a guy in Kansas City who was our postal advocate.  He's been awesome, helped us out during the snowstorm election in February, and then, he vanished.

I was worried that he took another job.  I called him.  I sent him emails.  I lit candles at church.

All, to no avail.

He emerged about 6 weeks ago and, for whatever reason, hadn't received my S.O.S.  He was back in the game, though, he said, and he has definitely jumped in.

First, he talked with our old postmaster, now in Las Vegas.  He also talked with our current post minor (I'm not sure if he is the postmaster or just the guy in charge) at our post office.  This is the guy who told us that because we had an employee engaged to our old postal carrier (who retired 2 years ago) that we got better service than we should have.

Our advocate saw through this attitude, thankfully, and then after a strong wag of the finger to the post minor, called me to let me know he was on it.

At the same time, we began exploring ways to bypass the Olathe Post Office on the way out.  We have hooked up with Pitney Bowes in downtown Kansas City.  This operation is run by a former Sprint employee (as am I) and a Johnson County voter excited to be in the mix.

Wow, someone supporting our office excited to do so.  Wow, again.  Wow, again and again.

I bashfully asked if she, by chance, sure she didn't, just asking, hope she didn't mind, but just wondered--if she knew our advocate at the United States Postal Service.

She did!  They're buds.  And, they have a meeting this week to talk about the Overland Park mail ballot election that is forthcoming.

What a turn of events--there's even more to the positive news, and we're very optimistic.  I toured the facility and took pictures for the blog, but in my excitement the photos were too jumbly to post.

We still have to deal with the post office on the way back in, as ballots are delivered.  But this takes care of a huge ordeal sending them.

Still, what a turn, all the way to an end run.  We'll know soon how it works, but right now, the best way to be a satisfied customer is to be a non-customer.  The true winner, hopefully, will be Overland Park.

Quick Check-In

There have been a couple big reasons for my lapse in posting.

First, as happens about once a year, an overly out-of-control youngster attempts to kick a soccer ball while it is in my possession (hands, I'm a goalkeeper) and, instead, kicks me.  And, by kick, I mean this latest was a Chuck Norris roundhouse into the kidney.  The ball was five feet off the ground; there was never a chance the ball would be kicked.

So, I haven't felt like doing much of anything, let alone breathing or typing.  I'm mending and I think I'm a couple of days away from being able to stand up straight again.

It's put a blow into my continued hope for a goalkeeper glove endorsement deal ("Your election's in good hands.")

Second, it's been incredibly busy, and busy in a "there's so many things I could blog about" way.

We've got budget, postal, Photo ID/citizenship, and planning things going on and I need to provide updates on all of them.

I'll take the easy one quickly here. 

We again have a friend at the Postal Service.  It's our same friend, actually, who saved us during the winter blizzard election from our local Post Office that delivers excuses more frequently than ballots.

He'd been unreachable during the beginning of our Olathe Mail Ballot election and I worried he had moved on, taking a new job.

But, no!  We connected and he did some sleuthing on his own and drew the same conclusions I had.

I guess that's bad and good news.  We're just a few weeks from getting our ballots ready for the largest mail-ballot election in county history, so it's definitely good news that he's dialed in.

Next week, I'll be traveling to an election geekfest in Washington for a day to talk about some of the issues that triggered the formation of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

So, I hope to have a few updates next week.  For now, back to wheezing.

The Postal Death Spiral (Continued)

It's no secret that I'm unhappy with the service our office gets from the post office.

It's heightened anytime we have a mail-ballot election. 

During one-such election last year, as ballots were coming back sawed in half, the postmaster in Olathe agreed to meet with me.

I'd tried for years to get some sort of communication going.  Finally, I had it.

Sadly, he's no longer there.

For a while, we had a local Kansas City contact "here for you," following a dustup made on our behalf by Tammy Patrick, who is on the Election Center Postal Task Force (and, congratulations to her--also on the new Presidential Voting Commission named this week).

But, he's gone dark as well.

This past Tuesday, we took our 80,000+ ballots to the post office during their "business business hours," noon to 4 (!), and left feeling lucky that the ballots would be mailed because we made the tremendous blunder of not numbering our trays.

Today, expecting returned ballots in the mail, we got none.  Not one.

How odd.  Many people turn them around the day they get them and they come back postage-paid.  Mailed Tuesday, people started calling us Wednesday with questions so we know they were delivered, but not back in the Friday mail.

We got a call in the early afternoon that about 3,000 were at the post office. 

Oh.

Joe Biden frequently gets mail at our office, but on
Friday, no ballots came.

So they were there, just not counted--now to be delivered a day later (in this case, with a holiday weekend, four days later) than they should have been.

Mail-ballots have to be returned by noon on election day.  In this case, election day is June 10.  If today were June 10, that means 3,000 voters' ballots would not have counted.

Count me as outraged.

On election day we call the post office to see if any ballots are there and we pick them up.  Who knows what they would have said today?  We would have called at the same time our delivery came.

We have some insight into what the answer would have been:

On our infamous blizzard election snow day in February, we called on election day, realizing mail would not be delivered, to see if there were ballots to go get.  We were told they didn't have any ballots.  I didn't believe them.

So, I contacted our "there for you," guy (no longer, it appears there for us) and about a half hour later, we got a call from the post office that they, indeed, had ballots.  Again, had we not escalated, and gotten lucky it appears, voters would had their ballots not counted.

It's another example of the War on Voting that we're facing.  The post office considers cancelling Saturday delivery, raises postage, and reduces service levels.  We'd like to encourage people to vote by mail but it's hard to do that with a straight face.

Compound that with schools as polling place issues and limited options for advance voting sites, and the environment is making it hard for voters.

Again, I'm not necessarily an advocate FOR Internet voting, but the mail and other external factors are doing a pretty good job of clearing the fog around the Internet voting possibility.  At some point, it likely will be an option that will look better and better just because traditional methods look worse and worse.

It's hard to fathom that the postal service doesn't see this.  The story line about the need to eliminate Saturday delivery is that fewer items are mailed because of the Internet.  Their own service levels likely are pushing a huge customer (voters are the customer, we are the conduit) to the Internet.

February Election? Must Be Time for Snow

Today's snowstorm marked the biggest winter weather event in the last two years, since a February 2011 snowstorm that also occurred when an election was in full swing.

Two years ago, a huge snowstorm arrived on election day, a mail-ballot for the city of De Soto.  Mail-ballot elections end at noon on election day, and our office shut down shortly after that.

Today, a foot of snow fell between 7 and 11 a.m., the entire state literally was closed and announced the closure last night before the storm, UPS and the Postal Service aren't delivering, and here we are, waiting for our published public test of equipment to begin at 2 p.m. 

Our office also is open for advance voting, with no voters thus far, but we'll lock up for the day after the public test.

In both of these February blizzards, the county's offices opened, then closed, effectively endangering employees unneccessarily.  The county has the most advanced weather forecasting resources available, yet, apparently, refuses to believe them.

We determined that the advance voting schedule and the public test made some of us essential today.  I'm hardly essential but I personally have one of the easier commutes to our office.  Add that to the fact that, compared to my staff, I don't actually do any work, and the least I could do is be here.

We also wanted to be here in case today was the only day someone could vote. Kansas law requires advance voting begin in our office at least a week before the election, but there isn't any specification on the operating hours. 

However, the public test was an issue of our own making.  We learned today to add a disclaimer for future public tests to publish something along the lines of, "In case of an emergency-related building closure, the test will be the following day at the same time."

Weather like this brings up frightening thoughts about what we would have done if this were next Tuesday, election day, and we're stressing at the thought of another storm on Monday.  We'll cover that with our supervising judges during that training Saturday.

But then, in the kibitzing and planning, as we wondered if facilities will be open tomorrow to accept our polling place equipment and supplies, discussion turned to Monday.  We may need to push some Friday deliveries to Monday, particularly if no one is available to greet our deliveries tomorrow. 

It's very difficult to deliver supplies on Mondays to polling places, even though we use a large moving company, because there is simply a physical limit to the number of deliveries that can be made.  Election administration is known for it's Plan B, but we're looking at Plans C and D, considering calling in some temporary employees to help us with deliveries on Monday.

Before we could applaud our plans, though, another snowball full of "elections are hard, darn it," came flying at us.  The schools we are using in this election, because of the recent safety concerns, won't let us in Monday until 4 p.m. 

Really?  I know we are guests, but really?  Why us?  Are all deliveries and outsiders pushed to 4 p.m. or later?

Does the world not want elections?  (I remind you of my postal concerns and the fact that despite the, "Neither rain, nor snow" cliche, no mail and no ballots were delivered today).

There's an electionline.org article today quoting me on Internet voting and, contrary to how it may read, I am really not pro-Internet voting.  I'm just FOR VOTING, and the forces against us are beginning to wear me down.

Or, maybe it's just today's snow.  Monday's snow could definitely be a wet (or at least cold) blanket if the forecast is real, so we'll be working on our Plans C and D this weekend.

The Fuse Has Been Lit

This morning we're preparing to mail about 1,000 advance ballots for the February 26 election, the first day we can mail ballots, and also reviewing a mail-ballot election schedule requested by a school district.

It's happening as the Postal Service is announcing that it will stop delivering mail on Saturday.

Forget the "future of voting," as many want to discuss.  The present is drying up.

This follows yesterday's election administration news, where the New York Times summed up efforts related to reduce long lines at polling places.

One method of reducing lines is already in motion--eliminating polling places.  We're facing the possibility of losing several schools as polling places.

The Times article quotes a survey of waiting times per state in the presidential election  (Kansas was at 11.5 minutes) .  That same survey also looked nationally at voters' confidence that their vote would count as cast and only 56 percent who voted by mail answered affirmatively, compared to 67 percent at the polls and 65 percent in advance. 

In this same survey, 18 percent of the respondents said they had requested a ballot by mail but didn't get it.  These were national numbers, but I think they at least suggest that the Postal Service has more issues than just financial issues.

Without Saturday postal delivery, Johnson County voters who get ballots issued on the last day allowed by law (the Friday before the election) will have no way to turn them around and know they were delivered by Tuesday. There likely will be others who will find they need the Saturday delivery 10 days before the election to get their ballot before going out of town the following Monday morning and now otherwise will be unable to vote in an election.

In my view, eliminating any day of delivery is a mistake.  It's the beginning of what I've termed in other industries as the Light the Fuse Strategy.

I first coined the Light the Fuse Strategy when evaluating options while working as director of strategic planning at Sprint 10 years ago. We saw voice calls moving to calls over data facilities and wireline minutes shifting to wireless minutes.

We saw a large part of our revenues and margins evaporating, but we didn't stop letting people call on Saturdays. We recognized that shrinking to survive was not the answer.

Jettisoning an unprofitable part of the business can be a smart strategic move.  But shrinking to survive, or worse--thinking you are shrinking to grow--can be a terrible approach. Look at US News and Newsweek.  Those magazines still exist, virtually.  The fuse is nearing the end for them as well.
 

Here in town, how many of you remember The Olathe Daily News?  I remember a few columns in the Olathe News over the last few years that said the paper was changing its delivery schedule, but, not to worry, it was going to be stronger than ever.  

Now, the Daily News is a tiny insert in the Saturday Kansas City Star, which itself has shrunk to the point that the Monday edition often could benefit from some pebbles in the bag when tossed on driveways to keep the paper from blowing down the street.

 

I'm not pretending there are easy answers for what the Postal Service is going through.   But I do believe that they've created a victim mentality instead of creatively addressing the problem.

They have a huge competency in that they go to every home six days a week. Surely that can be exploited within other industries.

Instead, the Postal Service is eroding its core competency.

 

I believe, just like the transitions in the newspapers that used to be daily (that also went to homes, by the way), delivery stopping on Saturday is just the beginning.   The fuse will have been lit.

Eventually, mail will only be delivered, for instance, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Every change will decrease the importance of the Postal Service and, in turn, reduce the mail to be delivered, leading to the spiral.  The fuse will be burning.

It's rough for us because elections is an industry that is actually looking to increase the use of the Postal Service.  I can't think of another industry that is in that mode. 

So, the Future of Voting is now.  We are in the future.

Unfortunately, that's not intended to be some sort of inspirational message. 

In elections, we often deal with yesterday's issues.  And, we look at equipment issues as future issues.  The number one future issue is pretty basic--how are people going to vote in next presidential election?
 

In Johnson County, 340,000 people will vote for president in 2016.  Right now, I don't know how we will accomplish that.

I don't know that I will have enough sites available for polling places.  I don't know that voter confidence will continue with the mail service.  I don't even know what service level we'll get from the Postal Service.

Vote centers (mega polling places) are more and more likely, but they will be expensive sites to lease.

I'm not necessarily a proponent for Internet Voting, but I'm not an opponent, and it's quickly becoming the gorilla in the room.

I've often heard the proverbial gorilla described as a 600-pound gorilla and also as an 800-pound gorilla.  I've never known which weight was correct, but my hunch now is that the 600-pounder will become an 800-pounder as the sound of the latest burning fuse gets louder.

The Post Office Steps Up

It's been nearly a year since I met with the postmaster at the Olathe Post Office regarding our concerns with mail delivery, and I'd like to say things have been better.

That's what I'd like to say.

However, today we have progress. We can thank Tammy Patrick from Maricopa County, Arizona, for that.

Tammy carried our water in one of her meetings with the Post Office as part of a Western Region Focus Group. We're part of the Mid-America Region, but they had a representative at the meeting as well.

So, that person told a friend, who told a friend, and so on, and so on, and so on...

And, I got a call from a manager in Kansas City.  We talked this morning and I've never been more encouraged.

In fairness to purists of the definition of "encouraged," I've never actually been encouraged when it came to the postal service.  The postal service here regularly represents one of my personal Four Horsemen of Despair (the others being my newspaper delivery man, Time Warner Cable--whom I happily dispatched last year in favor of local company Surewest, and our trash/recyling company).

I sent our new contact the photos I gathered and have posted here.  He asked that I stay in touch with him and let him know of elections we have underway.  He said he understood that this was a period where elections weren't going on.

Not so fast, my new Postal Point Man!

I was happy to be able to immediately take him up on this.  We send out ballots on Wednesday for the spring primary, so I'll be able to test his resolve immediately.

It may not look like much, but having the local postmaster meet with me and now receiving this call from Kansas City, where all ballots pass through, is more action than I was able to trigger in my first seven years here.  My annual surveys sent to the post office were intercepted or not read, because some of my cries for help that I wrote likely would have made the receipt-writing pastor at Applebee's blush.

Cheers to Tammy Patrick, Johnson County's best friend voters didn't know they have.  Tammy's famous in the industry for being extremely thorough, as well as living proof of one my key theories of life--everything comes down to Powerpoint.  She's a Powerpoint expert (she probably has a Powerpoint presentation on how she uses Powerpoint), and many of us have pirated slides from her.

Thanks to her, there's hope for improvement. 

Speaking of ballots, they should arrive from our printer late this afternoon.  It will be our first test of the printer since some personnel changes.  Things (assuming "things" mean "communications") have gone well thus far, but we're anxious to get these ballots, get them in the mail next week, and begin to see the results of the new postal attention in action.

Perhaps soon we really will be able to say things are better.

Back to the Present

Coming back from the future of election discussions with vendors and colleagues, we're facing the reality that the present state of elections could be a lot better.

Filing deadline for the spring elections is Tuesday at noon, and right now we have a relatively small primary--two wards in one city, with about 50,000 voters.

It's a good thing because we're going through uncertainty with the printing of our paper ballots.   Our printer has had some personnel changes and we need to see if performance has been impacted in advance of our countywide April election.

Printing of ballots is complex.  When I came in 2005, we had a dispute with a local printer from the 2004 presidential election.  The ballot printing was awful and the ballots often wouldn't scan.  Candidate names sometimes were in the center of ballots.

This dispute rankled the owner of the company and he told me that he wouldn't print our April ballots unless we paid this disputed invoice.  We later settled, in our favor, and he never printed ballots for us again.  We couldn't do business with someone who held us hostage like that.

So, we set out to find a new printer and had, for instance, a great conversation with Henry Wurst, the largest printer in the Kansas City area.  They printed some ballots for us in a test election but had to come back and say they couldn't support us--ballot printing is too complex.  Timing marks have to be perfect for scanning, there are literally hundreds of different ballot styles because of candidate rotation, we need some folded for mailing, and, oh, by the way, we usually need them within a week of ordering.

Many communities are looking at or using ballot-on-demand printers, and that may work at advance locations, but it wouldn't be practical for us at polling places.  Only a small portion of ballots are cast on paper at those locations.

The bigger issue related to paper continues to be the post office.  Postage is our largest office expense and the service where we have the least satisfaction.  At the Election Center meeting last week, I listened to the same presentation from the Post Office that I have heard for nearly a decade, how the office is working with election officials to make sure everything runs smoothly. 

The person presenting had been given photos of our ballots from last spring, so I hopped up to the open mic and stressed the disconnect between his view and our view on the ground.  Apparently, there is a special online reporting form where I can go to document this and all will be fixed.  We'll do this and check in with him next January, but I'm not optimistic.

Postage rates are going up and there will be more changes to post offices and deliveries.  This is all bad news in the voting-by-mail world, which more and more becomes an unrealistic option to voting at the polls.

Voting at the polls is under siege, of course, because of school safety concerns.  Churches are less available to us right now because of Easter and we get plenty of complaints from using churches.

In April 2005, with a marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot, the number one voter complaint was the use of churches as polling places.  In a special election in September 2005, regarding a sales tax that funded schools, our number one voter complaint was the use of schools as polling places.  If the "sugar tax," or a "calorie tax," ever makes it to a ballot, expect our use of Denny's to be an issue.

And Internet voting?  No way.  Never.  That's what we're told, anyway.

Detractors point to the problems with the Oscar nominations, selected through Internet voting.  Dig deeper into that and you'll find the problems were log-in questions and unfamiliarity with the Internet, not security issues.

We're left with the conventional wisdom that there's no possible way that Internet voting can be as reliable as current methods.

Really?  What's the reliability gauge?  We're running out of ways to vote here. We need the future of voting to be defined because the current state of voting is evaporating.

I still say, to the "No way, never," crowd on Internet voting, this will be forced on us eventually.  I truly believe that.  It's human nature to think we're in control of our own destiny, but we often aren't.

As department directors at Sprint we used to tell our employees that we were in a new era, the end of lifetime employment, and that they need to take control of their own careers.  We would encourage them to ponder their own career path and ask them how they would go from their current position to position A, B, or C. 

Then, we'd reorganize and tell them that they had a new role.  Or, they'd be laid off.  So much for them taking control of their destiny.

One day, a state legislature will pass a law that mandates Internet voting by a specific day.  Or, a city will somehow charter out of conventional elections to use Internet voting, requiring some sort of shift by a county election office.  Or, an equivalent of a coporate reorganization will occur, and there we'll be.

That's the future of elections--a winding road splintered from the present.

Master and Servant

I met today with the postmaster at our post office.

To his credit, he is the only postmaster in my 7 years here who has ever talked with our office about issues.  It's not like he reached out to us, but he has been responsive.

(I'm just sayin' that, at the very least, if I ran a post office branch I would take a look at our largest business customers and maybe send them a piece of undamaged physical mail to introduce myself and invite them to call me with any issues.  I might even want to know what I could do to grow their business with the Postal Service.)

However, he did return my call two weeks ago and during that call, and today, he seemed empathetic.

He asked me if things were better and I said they were related to the delivery time of ballots but that I had seen more damaged pieces of mail in this past set of mail-ballot elections than I had seen with all ballots through the mail in the last seven years.

I showed him this picture, of a ballot that arrived Tuesday, a week after the election closed.  This wasn't the worst of the damaged ballots we received. 

He took me over to our station and showed me a couple more damaged ballots heading our way today.

I pointed out to him that this damage means persons' votes didn't count.  He said he understood, but I wonder.

The culprit, he said, was the Kansas City post office, where the mail is sorted mechanically.  He told me how they've had roller issues.

I stressed to him how important voting by mail was to us.  More than 20 percent of the votes in 2008 were ballots cast through the mail.  We need those kinds of numbers in 2012 to avoid long lines at the polling places.

I pointed out the sign that I photo'd earlier for my previous post and told him what a joke I thought that was.  He didn't see the humor or the disconnect.  He truly believes that the United States Post Office would eat UPS's lunch, for instance, if UPS delivered mail.

All I know is that I've never received half a box in a plastic bag from UPS.

But, I do have a local contact at our post office and I've never had that before.  So, there's that. 

However, this post office also is on the list to close very soon.  I can only describe my feeling about that as a type of Stockholm Syndrome.  As bad as things have been, using another post office would be inconvenient.

I came back to my office and was greeted with a news headline that the Postal Service lost $3.3 billion in its first quarter.  There's growing talk of a bail-out bill for the Postal Service.  I think the losses are being allowed to hemorrhage to force that discussion.

Hopefully, that discussion will include an honest evaluation of service.  We aren't even alone in the local election community, so I'm sure service issues run deep. 

Surely, large businesses are leaving because of the service.  If voters can't trust that their ballots will arrive through the mail, this is another a huge revenue stream that will be lost as well.

Fractions, Onions, and Inactive Voters

Much of this blog thus far has been an intro, the setup to the plot.

You're meeting the characters and getting some of the background so posts over the spring and summer are 10 paragraphs instead of 100.

This is one of those background pieces.

I traded emails with a friend this weekend about turnout this November and reminded him that I've been predicting a drop in the turnout, 2012 from 2008, since the day after the 2008 presidential election.

That's important, because if the turnout is lower, the convenient story line will be that it happened because of Photo ID.  That won't be why--photo ID legislation was barely a gleam in the eye when I began predicting lower turnout in 2012  3 1/2 years ago.

I believe the Johnson County turnout will be 75 percent, down from 78 percent in 2008.  I have some thoughts as to why the turnout will be lower and will present that in future posts.

For now, I wanted to take you back to the third-grade and suggest that turnout percentage is merely the first layer of the onion.  As a third-grader, I did not like onions, but that's also when I hit fractions and division with zeal, and that's the part of the third-grade we're visiting.

You see, turnout percentage is simply the number of voters divided by the number of registered voters.

Unless, in Kansas, if you are looking at a mail-ballot election, where turnout reported to the Secretary of State is the number of voters divided by the number of active voters.  For purposes of our website reporting in those elections, though, we show the percentage "straight"--votes divided by voters.

Active and inactive voters become terminology needed to understand turnout.  That's because a turnout percentage relies on the numerator (the number of voters in this case) as much as it does the denominator (the number of eligible voters).  Year to year, state to state, these simple variables can, um, vary.

Inactive voters would be eligible voters if they came into the polling place to vote.  But it is highly unlikely they will do that.

Inactive is code for, "We don't think you live there anymore."  Once inactive, a voter is included in the denominator (the number of eligible voters) although the likelihood of the inactive voter voting is very small.

How does someone move from active to inactive?

Some communities use the post office's national change of address (NCOA) to get updates.  Johnson County utilized NCOA about 25 years ago and it was essentially a disaster because the county's street guide doesn't always match the post office's and the result can be someone living on a border street being reclassified to the wrong city and getting the wrong ballot.

Postcard Mailed in Roeland Park

The other method of verifying addresses, by federal law, is to send a confirmation mailing to all active voters once a year.  That's what we do.

Every election, we send a postcard to each registered voter who's not inactive.  The postcard tells the voter about the upcoming election but the postcard can't be forwarded.  If returned to us, we flag the voter as inactive and send a second mailing that can be forwarded.  This mailing is a, "Whassup?  Did you move?" kind of notice where we ask the voter to modify his or her registration or inform us of a change.

If nothing changes on the voter's record from that point, and the voter doesn't vote, the voter can be removed from the registration list after two federal elections.  So, someone marked inactive with the upcoming Roeland Park election would be removed after the November 2014 election.  If the voter votes in that time, the voter becomes active again.

So, at any time, the voter registration list has a fair number of people registered who no longer live at the address registered.  And, by law, they can't be removed.

Factors influence the number of inactive voters.  One major factor is the economy--people have moved less frequently, I suspect, over the last two years and that makes trending on percentages alone imperfect.

Another factor is the cards themselves.  We began sending them before every election in 2007.  The frequency of the cards and elections illuminates someone as a potential inactive voter much earlier than an annual mailing only.  Depending on the timing of the inactive tag, someone could remain on the rolls for 2.5 to 4 years.

Because the purging happens after a November election, the number of inactive voters is highest heading into a gubernatorial or presidential election.  Thus, the denominator is larger than it should be if you were looking for an accurate turnout percentage.

Whew, that's a lot of typing, and I've only scratched the surface.  But, in looking at turnout, start with the numerator--voters.

Voters are real and it helps me if I start thinking about how many of them will vote in advance, and how many of those who vote in advance will do so by mail or at one of our in-person locations and then, further, how many would vote at each of those locations.

In many ways, the percentage is meaningless.  Number of actual voters is the true metric.

There will be a lot written (and there has been a lot written) about voter participation and turnout.  It almost always is in terms of percent.  If you're digging into it, take a bite out of the onion and go beyond the first layer of numbers to draw meaningful conclusions.

Mail Ballots, Without Using the Mail

Not yet a month into the blog, and the persistent topic theme is the Post Office.

This sign ironically hangs in our post office.

We have two mail-ballot elections going on, with about 90,000 first-class ballots sent and all those returned coming back first-class.  The return rate for mail-ballot elections is about 40 percent.

The postage on the two is about $60,000.

This morning, for the third time, we didn't get any ballots with our regular mail.  We received some that were returned as undeliverable, but our carrier today said he was told there weren't any others.

Really?  All weekend, no ballots came through the office?

We called.  Yes, we were told, there are five trays, but they were not ready when the carrier was ready to leave.  We can get them delivered tomorrow.  The local office would not bring them to us today, so we've sent staff members to get them.

We asked why they weren't ready earlier and we were told that the office wasn't going to spend money on overtime for these.

I certainly don't want anyone to work extra, but as a matter of policy, these are pieces of election mail and $60,000 probably would cover a little overtime, wouldn't it?

By the way, this is one of the post offices slated to close, a fact that came without surprise to me.  This is the same post office that only accepts business from businesses from noon until 4.

This is why it's hard to take seriously comments from Paul Vogel at the U.S. Postal Service that "the post office is here to stay."

Was Monday MLK Day or Labor Day?

We've had an active election every day in my seven years at the Johnson County Election Office.

That means that as we've come in to work each day, there has been an election in the works, one we specifically are working on, as opposed to just knowing we've got one down the road.  Part of that is because elections go on for a couple of weeks after election day as we process provisional ballots and do post-election audits.

Coincidentally, Doug Chapin just posted about that yesterday: "When is an Election Over?"

For those who have been at the office longer than me, that streak goes back to 2003, so nine years with an active election.  It's the reason why, although I'm the 5th most tenured out of the eight election commissioners the county has had, I will have administered more elections than any other commissioner after our February elections.

Right now, we're working on elections 41, 42, 43, and 44 in my time, and I've been here seven years and one week.  My predecessor, Connie Schmidt, was the previous "champ" with 43 in nine years.

Yesterday, a member of our staff came in to my office today and said, "I don't know what it is, I just can't seem to get focused right now."  I told her we were all feeling that way, that it just seems busier than normal for January.  (January is busy enough, because the spring filing deadline for candidates is next week).

Reality is, we ARE busier than normal.  We've never had four elections in a 5-week period before.  The two mail-ballot elections we have cross county lines and we're the "home" county, so that adds to the prism of complexity.

Oh, and looking at the tags of my posts, I'm surprised that the most common tag is the post office, but postage changes will add to our zaniness.

Jurisdictions pay for the actual costs of administering the elections.  Midway through these mail-ballots, this weekend, we have a postage rate increase.  In mail-ballot elections, voters return the ballots postage-paid.  In tracking the costs now, we'll have some returned at one rate and others returned at a different rate.

We also mail postcards out to voters to let them know of an upcoming election.  We just got our cards printed for the small election in Roeland Park and planned to mail them next week, but we rushed Friday afternoon to the post office to beat the price increase.

It saved the city $9, to which you might say, "Eh?"  And, if this truly was Labor Day week and not Martin Luther King Day week, our stepped-up workload might have led us to the same thought.

But just guessing at the city's sales tax rate, it would take about $300 in sales at Walmart to generate $9, so $9 is at least a little more significant than it sounds.

Our Board Is Special

Ballots mailed out for two school district elections hit voter mailboxes last Thursday.

We mailed out about 87,000 ballots.  After the long holiday weekend, we got our first batch returned by voters, about 30 trays.

For each election, by law, I appoint a special board to process the ballots returned.  What this means is that regular staff members are not part of the canvassing process.

The Special Board meets in a Secure Room, which requires two staff

members (one with a key and another with a code) to allow entry.  

One of the rules--no black or blue pens allowed in the room.

There really isn't a long list of qualifications for the special board, except that we should have a mix of registered voters who have affiliated with each major party.  In Kansas, that registration simply means which state primary you would be eligible for every other August.

We pull from past election workers.  The most important role on this board is that of the supervising judge of the board and we use her input when identifying members of the board.  We look for reliable persons, neutral and pretty much void of opinions, and persons who are available the entire time, including the week or more after the election as we prepare for the final canvass and approval of results, as well as any potential recount.

We've had three different persons leading this room since I've been here.  The first two, eventually, were hired as full-time staff members, so we had a good transition.  In November, we'll need a special board of about 20.

A voter asked me last year to describe members of the special board and I asked the supervising judge once what she would say. 

Her answer came in less than two seconds.

"We're all grandmothers," she said.

For these elections, we have a special board of 7 and the two school districts will save a little money by sharing the cost of the board.  They will be here all day for a couple of days, then schedule their time to be here half days, coming after the mail arrives.

For each envelope, before it can ever be opened, the board verifies the signature on the envelope against the voter's registration card.  Some communities have an automated system.  Here, they eye-ball it, with deference to the voter.  If it looks different, they pull all of the registrations in that household and compare.  Non-matches are made provisional and taken to the Board of County Canvassers for determination if they can be opened and counted.

30 trays of voted ballots came today, ready
for signature verification.

It's usually pretty obvious if mom or dad, for instance, signed for a child.  Sometimes, they have to dig deeper and look at the digits and writing on the registration cards to compare letters beyond the signature--the voter also has to rewrite his or her address.

With the volume we process, there isn't time to go back to voters and say, essentially, "Denied."  If the signature is off and it's not obvious that it was signed by someone else, we send a letter to the voter that basically says, "We think we need an updated signature.  Please sign and return this."  Then, we scan that new signature to the voter record.

We also don't have any systematic way, election to election, to track if a voter's signature didn't match.  The outcome of the ballot is stored on the voter's record, though.  So, it's possible that there could be someone who has signed for another family member for years, each time the ballot not counting, with the person who signed wrongly thinking he or she has outsmarted the system.

About 10 percent of ballots
mailed come back undeliverable.
They can't be forwarded.

Beyond the ones voted and returned, in each election, we get a significant amount returned as undeliverable.  In mail-ballot elections, we mail to each active voter, so the amount returned is at least 10 percent.  But we get many returned in every election, even for cases where people applied for a ballot just a month before we mailed it.

It just shows how frequently people move.  When working for the local telephone side at Sprint, I learned that that one-third of our directory turned over each year in terms of adds, moves, and changes.

If you have children on sports teams, take a look at the team pictures over a five-year period, and you'll see the turnover.

The undeliverable ballots start a whole process that begins the clock, by law, for removable from the voting rolls.  We run that process pretty tightly and you can still see that a good 10 percent of our voters, at a minimum, are no longer living where they registered.  Look for a future post on this whole process.

Mail Ballot Elections

Our ballots for the two January 31 mail-ballot elections were taken to the post office yesterday and people began reporting that were received today.

Both of these elections are school-district elections.  Mail-ballot elections typically have a higher turnout that elections at the polls but are more costly, in part because of the higher participation.  In mail-ballot elections, the jurisdiction pays for the return postage.  In other elections, with advance voting by mail, the voters pay the return postage.

So, the higher the turnout, the greater the return, the higher the cost.

When I came in 2005, we had three mail-ballot elections in process.  Identity theft was a growing topic then and we had voters complain that their signatures on the envelopes were exposed, essentially, while coming back through the mail.

We worked to design an envelope that allowed for the signature to be covered by a flap that could be removed by our election workers, to verify signature, without yet opening the envelope.  We were pioneers in this regard, actually, and many communities use this method now.  Our envelopes offer ID protection, but are customized.

The envelopes have increased in price, however, to the point that in small quantities, the envelope alone is $2.  In the quantities for these elections, it's closer to $1, but it highlights the costs of elections.  A typical mail-ballot election costs between $2.50 and $3.00 per registered voter, and the envelope is the highest cost item. 

Not the ballot, not the workers to process, not the cost of publishing the notice, not even the postage going out, or the postage coming in, or the postage combined--instead, the envelope.