The election story of the year in Kansas is redistricting.
Of course, there are election stories regarding candidates and issues, but that's not the focus here. There are candidate impacts from redistricting, though, and, in particular, potential candidates sitting on the sidelines trying to determine if this is the year they should run.
A principled candidate may want to run if he or she feels a void of those principles exist in leadership of a particular district. But that same potential candidate may not want to run if there is another candidate already running who shares his or her values.
If candidates are on the sidelines at this late date for an August 7 election, voters will have little time to be captivated. Military ballots need to be mailed in three weeks and advance voting starts about a month later.
The August election, usually with a turnout of about a third of the November presidential election, is looking like it will have a stark turnout.
Yesterday was the filing deadline for candidates except for those races impacted by redistricting, currently in the hands of a federal court.
We had our usual flurry of filings until the noon deadline and then a few precinct committee filers who thought the deadline was 5 p.m., only to have those filings rejected.
Our office had been madly proofing candidate names and pushing to get information updated on our website. Usually at this point we would begin creating the election in our election management system, build the races, set the rotation (candidate names in many races have to be rotated by law so each candidate gets equal time at the top of the ballot), and create the ballots.
But this filing deadline was only Part A. The second act is scheduled for June 11. That's assuming the federal court is able to resolve the redistricting next week.
Drawing of boundary maps is not easy and although the court has plenty of people offering help in the forms of maps drawn, the court is trying to do something in two weeks that the legislature couldn't do in more than two months (really, five months, but I wanted to use "two" twice there).
Drawing the boundaries is complicated by the need to have comparable numbers of voters in each district (the deviation in the four U.S. congressional boundaries has to be incredibly low, less than 10 voters). Even if there were no political factors at play, this is not an easy task.
There's still the potential of two elections in August, still the unresolved issue of whether or not the voter registration system can have the same voter in two elections at the same time, and the major issue that we don't have polling places or election workers secured for the second floating potential election day.
We have buttoned down advance voting sites for August and November and we could try to turn those sites into mega-polling places for August's second election day, if that happened. It would be the vote center concept mentioned on the site before.
Such an idea may be pure genius or crazy talk (or both) but we plan to hash through the drivers and restrainers of such a focus early next week. I will create a post related to that if it looks like maps won't be approved next week.
Showing posts with label Vote Centers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vote Centers. Show all posts
Saturday, June 2, 2012
August,
Redistricting,
Vote Centers
0
comments
Hurry Up and Wait, Then Wait and Hurry Up
It may not be as dramatic sounding as the media's phrase, "War on Christmas," or many of the other wars on societal issues, but as we prepare for more elections, we're reminded of the constant war on polling places.
Selecting polling places is a no-win endeavor.
For instance, in April 2005, the election featured a question on same-sex marriage. I received several complaints from voters that some of our polling places were churches, potentially influencing the outcome of this vote.
Then, in September 2005, we had a special election for a sales tax that was directed to schools. I received a similar number of complaints from voters that some of our polling places were schools, potentially influencing the outcome of this vote.
We used the same polling places for both elections.
Most of our polling places are donated space. That's important because one thing I hear often from our county manager is how expensive elections are.
They are expensive. But that expense is relevant if you are comparing the cost to zero. Merely having an election is expensive because it's an event for, in our case, 360,000 people.
Consider that voting machines are a sunk cost, polling places are nearly free, election workers make minimum wage (if that) and that our most expensive part of the election is the bundle that comes as an advance ballot by mail (ballot printing, envelope printing, and postage).
Of course, fewer polling places with more election workers squeezes efficiencies. Instead of having 500 polling places with 3 workers, we could have 300 with 5 workers--same number of workers, but less expense in transporting voting supplies, fewer overall supplies, and fewer machines needed.
We do that already. Ideally, we'd match polling places to precincts and we have about 550 precincts.
Instead, we utilized 284 in 2008, down from 286 in 2004. Incidentally, that's not two we lost--we lost 100 and found 98 new sites, for a net reduction of 2.
This year, we'll probably be at around 275. We'd like to secure the same location for voters for a string of elections so they aren't moved frequently (another complaint).
Johnson County is fortunate that we have many newer churches and facilities that can be used as polling places, that are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and have adequate parking.
Parking is vital. Putting 2,000 voters into a polling place with 40 parking spaces causes problems (another complaint).
So, what if we went nutzoid, didn't "pin" a person to a particular polling place and had, essentially, the advance voting model on election day? In other parts of the country, this has been tried and is often termed "vote centers."
We have a pretty good feel for the number of persons who would vote in a presidential election and how many would vote in advance, so, roughly, we would need to take care of about 200,000 voters on election day.
If we had 60 locations, that would average about 3,300 persons voting at each site. That's more than we've had at any of our advance voting locations on any day, but it gives us a feel for the size of the facilities we would need. Our advance voting locations have handled 2,500 voters before with about a 45-minute wait.
So, that's leap one, that 60 would be okay and that 45-minutes, on average, would be an acceptable wait to vote.
About those 60--they'll have to be networked together so we make sure someone doesn't vote at one place and bop on to another. First, though, where exactly are these 60 places?
We might be able to secure some very large churches and community centers, but we'd probably have to rent facilities: likely, hotels. So, when we look at the network costs, although there may be some wireless options at times that are cheaper, we'll often have to go through the facility itself.
We have one person negotiate space with our polling places and our advance voting locations. The polling places are relatively easy but when we get to the advance sites--with rent, contracts, insurance, etc.--it becomes extremely time consuming. We have no resource, or support, to identify and negotiate with 100 potential locations to get us to 60 that work.
Assuming we could get through that knothole, though, this idea looks pretty good. We'd still have about the same number of election workers, but we would gain efficiencies in machine use.
Our rent costs, though, would increase from about $5,000 for an election to a couple hundred thousand dollars. Again, elections are expensive when compared to a cost of zero, but compared to real-world costs, elections are a bargain. We'd hit the real world if we sign leases with hotels and other for-profit locations.
Results would take longer because it would take about an hour to close all of the machines (they'd have every race in the county loaded instead of just those at one polling place). Of course, the line at 7 p.m. would be longer, too, so the machines may not be shut down until about 7:45 p.m., with cards leaving the facility at about 8:45, arriving at our location for uploading perhaps by 9, with uploading done by midnight.
We get skewered when our results for a presidential election aren't up by 10:30 now, even though we're traditionally the first in the area and the first large county in the state with final results.
Hmmm...this reminds me of a voting task force meeting I was in a couple of years ago when a professor from Washburn provoked, "If you thought about it, starting from scratch, would it make sense to design a voting system where you had hundreds of polling places where people could only vote where they were assigned?"
"Of course not!," I thought. We were all nodding our heads in agreement with the wisdom this question brought.
But, as I sat and thought more about that question, and in pondering some of the details I just typed, I think my answer would be yes. I almost think that successfully moving from that model would require something even more dramatic than vote centers and that would be a single voting location for the county on election day.
Of course, there are some who might say that a single location would be possible if that location was a website and we had Internet voting, but that's a whole 'nother discussion and blog post.
A single location is equal part crazy talk and genius, but it probably leans eventually to the crazy talk side.
For now, having opened up a topic without a clear solution, we're off to assigning voters for this fall to polling places.
Selecting polling places is a no-win endeavor.
For instance, in April 2005, the election featured a question on same-sex marriage. I received several complaints from voters that some of our polling places were churches, potentially influencing the outcome of this vote.
Then, in September 2005, we had a special election for a sales tax that was directed to schools. I received a similar number of complaints from voters that some of our polling places were schools, potentially influencing the outcome of this vote.
We used the same polling places for both elections.
Most of our polling places are donated space. That's important because one thing I hear often from our county manager is how expensive elections are.
They are expensive. But that expense is relevant if you are comparing the cost to zero. Merely having an election is expensive because it's an event for, in our case, 360,000 people.
Consider that voting machines are a sunk cost, polling places are nearly free, election workers make minimum wage (if that) and that our most expensive part of the election is the bundle that comes as an advance ballot by mail (ballot printing, envelope printing, and postage).
 |
| Of the 284 Polling Places used in the 2008 Presidential election, we spent $5,000 in rent because the majority of them were free. |
We do that already. Ideally, we'd match polling places to precincts and we have about 550 precincts.
Instead, we utilized 284 in 2008, down from 286 in 2004. Incidentally, that's not two we lost--we lost 100 and found 98 new sites, for a net reduction of 2.
This year, we'll probably be at around 275. We'd like to secure the same location for voters for a string of elections so they aren't moved frequently (another complaint).
Johnson County is fortunate that we have many newer churches and facilities that can be used as polling places, that are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and have adequate parking.
Parking is vital. Putting 2,000 voters into a polling place with 40 parking spaces causes problems (another complaint).
So, what if we went nutzoid, didn't "pin" a person to a particular polling place and had, essentially, the advance voting model on election day? In other parts of the country, this has been tried and is often termed "vote centers."
We have a pretty good feel for the number of persons who would vote in a presidential election and how many would vote in advance, so, roughly, we would need to take care of about 200,000 voters on election day.
If we had 60 locations, that would average about 3,300 persons voting at each site. That's more than we've had at any of our advance voting locations on any day, but it gives us a feel for the size of the facilities we would need. Our advance voting locations have handled 2,500 voters before with about a 45-minute wait.
So, that's leap one, that 60 would be okay and that 45-minutes, on average, would be an acceptable wait to vote.
About those 60--they'll have to be networked together so we make sure someone doesn't vote at one place and bop on to another. First, though, where exactly are these 60 places?
We might be able to secure some very large churches and community centers, but we'd probably have to rent facilities: likely, hotels. So, when we look at the network costs, although there may be some wireless options at times that are cheaper, we'll often have to go through the facility itself.
We have one person negotiate space with our polling places and our advance voting locations. The polling places are relatively easy but when we get to the advance sites--with rent, contracts, insurance, etc.--it becomes extremely time consuming. We have no resource, or support, to identify and negotiate with 100 potential locations to get us to 60 that work.
Assuming we could get through that knothole, though, this idea looks pretty good. We'd still have about the same number of election workers, but we would gain efficiencies in machine use.
Our rent costs, though, would increase from about $5,000 for an election to a couple hundred thousand dollars. Again, elections are expensive when compared to a cost of zero, but compared to real-world costs, elections are a bargain. We'd hit the real world if we sign leases with hotels and other for-profit locations.
Results would take longer because it would take about an hour to close all of the machines (they'd have every race in the county loaded instead of just those at one polling place). Of course, the line at 7 p.m. would be longer, too, so the machines may not be shut down until about 7:45 p.m., with cards leaving the facility at about 8:45, arriving at our location for uploading perhaps by 9, with uploading done by midnight.
We get skewered when our results for a presidential election aren't up by 10:30 now, even though we're traditionally the first in the area and the first large county in the state with final results.
Hmmm...this reminds me of a voting task force meeting I was in a couple of years ago when a professor from Washburn provoked, "If you thought about it, starting from scratch, would it make sense to design a voting system where you had hundreds of polling places where people could only vote where they were assigned?"
"Of course not!," I thought. We were all nodding our heads in agreement with the wisdom this question brought.
But, as I sat and thought more about that question, and in pondering some of the details I just typed, I think my answer would be yes. I almost think that successfully moving from that model would require something even more dramatic than vote centers and that would be a single voting location for the county on election day.
Of course, there are some who might say that a single location would be possible if that location was a website and we had Internet voting, but that's a whole 'nother discussion and blog post.
A single location is equal part crazy talk and genius, but it probably leans eventually to the crazy talk side.
For now, having opened up a topic without a clear solution, we're off to assigning voters for this fall to polling places.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Future of Voting,
Near-Field Communications,
Vote Centers
0
comments
Bring Your Own Voting Machine
It's capital budget time at the county, and that has major implications for the future of voting in Johnson County.
First, the capital budget process has been tamped down in an environment of cuts. If you can't put "public safety" into the name of your project, there's likely little traction to be seen.
There's been a lot of talk in the elections industry about the sustainability of voting systems. In this context, many communities purchased new voting systems with money provided by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and those systems will soon be showing their age, requiring replacement, but there is no available funding and tapping into local government's capital process generally is futile.
In Johnson County's case, the acquisition path of our 2,500 touch-screen voting machines started in 2001 before HAVA. The majority of our machines were purchased with county funds.
My predecessor wisely pushed the county to create a replacement fund schedule and that went great until the latest recession. The funds put aside weren't enough to pay for a new system, but would have gone a long way towards the system. Some years funds were transferred, other years were skipped, and now its use is really just to augment and keep our current fleet breathing.
Best-case, our fleet breathes last in April 2017. The goal is to replace the system in 2016 or after April 2017.
Either way, we have to build the process into the capital budget now. Our current fleet of machines, if replaced in today's dollars, is more than $13 million. For comparison sake, that's more than the cost of a new jail and usually the type of dollars that requires a new tax, such as a quarter-cent sales tax.
I have been very active with the open-source software gang and in considering open architecture where the voting system is not utilizing a proprietary piece of hardware. The downside to that is that hardware changes frequently, more than annually, and we don't want to have a hodgepodge of technology that makes training difficult.
There have been discussions about moving to iPads or other devices that reduce the warehouse footprint. (Touch-screen technology has come a long way since our voting machines--that's another post coming).
Then, you have the certification issues by Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The only thing worth talking about that topic right now is that vendors have invested millions into this process and are going to look at communities like Johnson County to recover that, making future systems more expensive.
So, this is where we're going: we're not going to buy a new system.
That's the line I'm drawing and pushing. Amid many reasons why this is a crazy idea, I'm going to force myself, our staff, our county, and vendors to accept that these are objections to work through in design, not reasons to say this won't work.
The vision I see is one where a voter comes into a polling place with a device--iPad, iPhone, Android, whatever they have--and either through Near-Field communication (ala Google Wallet) or by tapping in a voter number we give the voter, the voter's specific ballot comes up on the device.
The voter makes selections on his/her device, presses "print," and a paper ballot, with scanning marks, is printed for the voter to place in a scanner. The ballot isn't a label, isn't a barcode, and isn't in a format that only has the selections. The ballot is the ballot, just like they would get if someone mailed back one we printed and mailed them for advance voting. And it would work with our existing scanner model and software.
I have shared this with vendors who have quickly jumped to, "Yeah, we can do that today." That's not true. But they have some years to figure it out. I've done the heavy lifting. I'm an idea guy. Now, it's just a small matter of programming. :-)
But this is where we're going. It's Internet voting without the Internet. It has a paper trail. It hopefully uses our existing scanners and if designed right will do an end-run around many of the needs of EAC certification.
It's taking a page from the IRS playbook. Instead of our government sending out tax booklets, the cost of completing a tax return shifts to the end-user. I'm not cool with that concept, except that tax dollars are saved, but in this plan the end-user already has the device.
We will need to have a device at the polling place for the small number of persons who don't have a device, and by 2017 that will be a small number.
The main point is all about avoiding the $13 million capital outlay. We'll have to buy scanners and printers, and this will have to coincide with moving to vote centers (like mega advance voting sites) where users can go to any location and vote. I'm sure it can be done for 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of a straight replacement.
One thing about this is the idea that we have to get comfortable designing a voting system for the near future, not the dream system for the long future.
We also have the benefit of a major county, Los Angeles County, walking down the next-generation path about a year ahead of us. We'll learn a lot from them (that's a future post, too), particularly in ideation and in involving the user community.
But this is my resolve and the direction we are heading. We're hoping to collaborate with vendors over the next year to look at defining the requirements, but it means that nothing under development or certified currently by the EAC is something we would use. That's a harsh starting point.
If you're in the industry, you've probably thought of at least 10 reasons why this is wacky. The most important commitment to real progress is to treat them all as hurdles in design, not reasons to move on.
First, the capital budget process has been tamped down in an environment of cuts. If you can't put "public safety" into the name of your project, there's likely little traction to be seen.
There's been a lot of talk in the elections industry about the sustainability of voting systems. In this context, many communities purchased new voting systems with money provided by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and those systems will soon be showing their age, requiring replacement, but there is no available funding and tapping into local government's capital process generally is futile.
In Johnson County's case, the acquisition path of our 2,500 touch-screen voting machines started in 2001 before HAVA. The majority of our machines were purchased with county funds.
My predecessor wisely pushed the county to create a replacement fund schedule and that went great until the latest recession. The funds put aside weren't enough to pay for a new system, but would have gone a long way towards the system. Some years funds were transferred, other years were skipped, and now its use is really just to augment and keep our current fleet breathing.
Best-case, our fleet breathes last in April 2017. The goal is to replace the system in 2016 or after April 2017.
Either way, we have to build the process into the capital budget now. Our current fleet of machines, if replaced in today's dollars, is more than $13 million. For comparison sake, that's more than the cost of a new jail and usually the type of dollars that requires a new tax, such as a quarter-cent sales tax.
I have been very active with the open-source software gang and in considering open architecture where the voting system is not utilizing a proprietary piece of hardware. The downside to that is that hardware changes frequently, more than annually, and we don't want to have a hodgepodge of technology that makes training difficult.
There have been discussions about moving to iPads or other devices that reduce the warehouse footprint. (Touch-screen technology has come a long way since our voting machines--that's another post coming).
Then, you have the certification issues by Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The only thing worth talking about that topic right now is that vendors have invested millions into this process and are going to look at communities like Johnson County to recover that, making future systems more expensive.
So, this is where we're going: we're not going to buy a new system.
 |
| An old book, but my favorite on high-tech project management: "Get comfortable with the idea of building a useful but incomplete system," is the message. |
The vision I see is one where a voter comes into a polling place with a device--iPad, iPhone, Android, whatever they have--and either through Near-Field communication (ala Google Wallet) or by tapping in a voter number we give the voter, the voter's specific ballot comes up on the device.
The voter makes selections on his/her device, presses "print," and a paper ballot, with scanning marks, is printed for the voter to place in a scanner. The ballot isn't a label, isn't a barcode, and isn't in a format that only has the selections. The ballot is the ballot, just like they would get if someone mailed back one we printed and mailed them for advance voting. And it would work with our existing scanner model and software.
I have shared this with vendors who have quickly jumped to, "Yeah, we can do that today." That's not true. But they have some years to figure it out. I've done the heavy lifting. I'm an idea guy. Now, it's just a small matter of programming. :-)
But this is where we're going. It's Internet voting without the Internet. It has a paper trail. It hopefully uses our existing scanners and if designed right will do an end-run around many of the needs of EAC certification.
It's taking a page from the IRS playbook. Instead of our government sending out tax booklets, the cost of completing a tax return shifts to the end-user. I'm not cool with that concept, except that tax dollars are saved, but in this plan the end-user already has the device.
We will need to have a device at the polling place for the small number of persons who don't have a device, and by 2017 that will be a small number.
The main point is all about avoiding the $13 million capital outlay. We'll have to buy scanners and printers, and this will have to coincide with moving to vote centers (like mega advance voting sites) where users can go to any location and vote. I'm sure it can be done for 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of a straight replacement.
One thing about this is the idea that we have to get comfortable designing a voting system for the near future, not the dream system for the long future.
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.
We also have the benefit of a major county, Los Angeles County, walking down the next-generation path about a year ahead of us. We'll learn a lot from them (that's a future post, too), particularly in ideation and in involving the user community.
But this is my resolve and the direction we are heading. We're hoping to collaborate with vendors over the next year to look at defining the requirements, but it means that nothing under development or certified currently by the EAC is something we would use. That's a harsh starting point.
If you're in the industry, you've probably thought of at least 10 reasons why this is wacky. The most important commitment to real progress is to treat them all as hurdles in design, not reasons to move on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
- Follow Me on Twitter!
- "Like on Facebook!
- Join Me on Linkedin!
Contact