Track and Field

The Super Bowl is just hours away and a few hours from that, 9 a.m. tomorrow, the wrap-up will begin to our Super Bowl of elections--five school district mail-ballot elections on January 27.

That January 27 was a day. 

The election closed at noon, as ballots were being dropped off in person at the rate of 3 a minute.

Also at noon, the candidate filing deadline for the spring election.  With the deadline passed, about one-third of the county's voters have will be eligible for the spring primary on March 3.

We have a mayorial primary in Shawnee, two city council primaries in Roeland Park, and an Olathe School District primary.

We've had 5 mail-ballot elections on the same day (just now, but also 3 on the same day before), we've had different types of elections at the polls on the same day (primary in one city, recall in another), and we've had two different types of elections on the same day (mail-ballot ending at noon on the same day as a polls election ending at 7).

But we've never had the finish line tape crossed in one election at the same time the starter pistol was going for another.  That made Tuesday feel like an election office track meet. 

Some in our office were gathering the last ballots dropped; others were assessing which races might require primaries, polling places, election worker needs, and ballot plans.

It gave new meaning to continuing with an active election.

Ten years ago last month, I came to the Johnson County Election Office, and we have had an active election every moment in those 10 years.

How do I term an active election?  Well, one we are actively working on is the simplest way.

But the definition is more narrow. 

For instance, we're thinking about the 2016 presidential election, but that's not an active election. 

We're working on the spring primary--that's active.

It will be followed by the spring general--that's active.

The next election isn't scheduled until the winter of 2016.  The election isn't set, with candidates and questions, so that election isn't active.

And what that means is that fate is teasing us--the streak may come to an end in mid-April as we wrap up the spring canvass.

It's a bit of way to have an answer to the "what do you do the other 363 days of the year?" or "is that a full-time job?"

Back to the Super Bowl--I'm pretty sure the NFL event personnel work full-time for this once-a-year game. 

Elections are no different. 

We're event planners, after all.  That, and logistics managers. 

So, when I mention this active election streak, it means one thing to me and it means something else to those who were working at our office before I came.  As far as I can tell, the actual active election streak is about 14 years.

Tomorrow's canvass day--Groundhog Day, ironically--for the mail-ballot elections will mean closure to those five elections.  We're already working on election number six and seven.

It's unlikely that we will go the rest of 2015 without a special election. 

For instance, in 2013, the day after the spring election, I received a call from a city to schedule a mail-ballot election.

Nobody here is hoping for such a call this April.  We'd be fine with that streak ending.  We have more than enough pent-up work.

After all, advance voting for our real Super Bowl begins in just 21 months. 

School Elections Near the Finish Line

We're 48 hours from the close of the five school mail-ballot elections, collectively the largest mail-ballot effort we've ever had and the largest number of paper ballots ever processed in Johnson County.

And yet, I'm in the office and it's empty, calm. 

I did not see this coming.  I thought today we'd have a full crew in, buried, wondering what kind of reinforcements we needed.

Our crew left yesterday fully caught up, although we expect an onslaught in the mail tomorrow and many drop-offs Tuesday morning.

So, we don't know when we will have unofficial final results, but it's feeling more like it will be Tuesday, at some point, rather than Wednesday or later.

I could say the reason is our preparation.  That's definitely fair--we thought we were ready, but we weren't sure.  We had about 50 part-time workers, in different stages, different roles, different rooms.

I could say the reason was the decision to utilize a new high-speed scanner, the first ever of its type used in Kansas and one of the first times this model has been used in the country.  It was a big risk--going straight to a live election without staff training through a smaller or test election--but it has gone very smoothly.

I could say the reason is the dedicated hard work from all of our part-time employees.  That's definitely true.  It's very gratifying to see so many people here, working hard and getting paid very little, but caring so much for our voters.

Another factor, though, is that voters aren't voting.

We're at 95,267 ballots returned right now, about 29 percent of the 332,237 ballots issued.

I expected closer to 50 percent returned.  Likely, the final number will be less than 40 percent.

Mail for Santa in Miracle on 34th Street.  We expect
a similar picture, in living color, Tuesday.

As I like to say, there's a lot of baseball left to be played.  We might experience, for instance, a Miracle on 34th Street experience where the post office brings in tray after tray after tray of ballots on Tuesday.

As I type, cars are coming in at the rate of one per minute to drop off ballots.  That will become intense tomorrow and Tuesday.

Still, 40 percent turnout.  That's like, to paraphrase Nuke LaLoosh, lower than 50 percent. 

That's probably all that means.

I don't know that the turnout leads to any conclusions.  We did have a lot of undeliverable ballots (people move, you know) and the turnout is pretty consistent among all 5 districts.

Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission are both at 30 percent, De Soto is at 33 percent, and Olathe and Gardner-Edgerton are both at 26 percent.  Perhaps there is a difference in the communications efforts within the districts, but the number of voters and even the type of voter (apartment vs. home owner, school family vs. non-school) are probably the main factors.

An interesting Big Data project would be to compare all of those factors after the election is over.  While interesting, it simply may be just that.  I'm not sure how actionable the data would be.  There may be learnings political campaigns in these areas can gather for future races.

Our actionable list was very specific--job one was to get the job done.  We're well on our way.

Expect photos and an update on Election Day.

Or is that spring election filing deadline day?

Why, yes, it's the same day, the same time.

These elections close at noon on Tuesday, precisely the same time and date we will know the extent of our March primary election.

We already know we have a primary for Shawnee mayor.  That whole update, likely, will be Wednesday.

School Mail-Ballot Update

Many learnings, very busy as we're working on the 5 mail-ballot elections that culminate on January 27.

Our entire building is abuzz with people working on this election.  We've hired about 50 part-timers, nestled throughout the office.  Every room is an election room.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in this busy time, what's a thousand pictures worth?

Or, at least a few, below.

More, for reals, soon.

Now With Photos

Ballots are hitting the mail in our mega-mail ballot election.

Here are various photos from the mail processing site, a pit stop between the printer and the post office. 

We had them late last week, did some spot checking (just to make sure the right school's ballot is in the right, different-colored envelope), and got a sense of what 330,000 ballots looks like.

We had some issues with envelopes sticking together, but that seems to be worked out.

Outgoing postage was a little less than $100,000.

In the meantime, we're ramping up, converting meeting rooms into mail-processing rooms, making sure all of computers and hand-scanners work, and are ready--as much as possible--for the storm ahead.

Thinking of storm ahead, while it's cold in Kansas City today, in the "didn't come up with that worry until we got here" world, our whole concern with weather leading up to today was if a snowstorm would impact delivery of the ballots from Alabama to us.

Yesterday, and why it didn't cross my mind until yesterday I don't know, I realized a new crippling situation would be a massive snowstorm that keeps our special board from the office for a day or two.  That would put us 30,000 ballots behind faster than you could catch a snowflake on your tongue.

It's always something.

Here are the photos, below.  We'll have photos of our first batch of incoming, as well as, I expect, about 10,000 undeliverables, address changes, even though we just had a mass mailing to all voters in October.

Dropping Out of Society

I'm 10 days from being Johnson County Election Commissioner for 10 years, and in less than 7 days, we begin the most monumental thing our office has experienced in that time.

On Wednesday, we will mail out more than 330,000 ballots to voters in five of the county's six school districts.

The significance is not just the amount of paper and volume we're facing, but also that this is a steep mountain of paperwork, hitting us at a 90 degree angle and an equally fast drop-off after February.

That's an unusual way of saying, "We'll never see another like this."

So, what does that mean?  It means that if this were the new normal, where we moved to all mail elections for instance, we'd scale our operations in a way to permanently handle the volume.  This wouldn't be an egg going through a snake's body, but bunnies, constantly nibbling and sweetly multiplying.

I would have never considered our current stressed-out environment conjured up images of bunnies (or unicorns or rainbows), but fact is, we've historically proven we can handle a certain volume of transactions, and the number of registrations and voters reasonably increases over time. 

We would have time to request and budget additional resources.

If we moved to all-mail ballots, we'd have this big ramp up, but then, with each election, we'd only be dealing with the incremental changes.  January would be tough, but in a short-term-pain, long-term gain kind of way.  By the time we carried this new normal into 2016, if that's where we were headed, we'd have manageable routines.

Here, we've taken on this big meal and are trying to process it through our existing structure.  We have to do it this way because after the election, we're back to the processes we already have, with a spring primary already ensured for early March and then a countywide election at the polls in April.

The fact that we're having these elections in between November and April is news enough--we've never had this, this fast, this large.  In fact, election day is also the filing deadline--when we know how large the March primary is.  Talk about transitions:

Election ends at noon.  Filing deadline is at noon.  The finish line for one and starting line for another is the same line.

So, how to deal:  first off, we're on lock-down. 

I've already informed our staff that days out of the office require two levels of approval a week in advance and my administrative assistant has shut down all meeting scheduling until April 15.

I'm dropping out of society, much the way new parents do when having a newborn (and, I've often here compared elections to babies--babies are cuter, but bunnies are cute, too).

We are utilizing an ES&S high-speed scanner for ballot scanning--the first in Kansas and one of the first times in the country--and we're being trained on next week.  By the time we are experts with, we will flex back to normal size, essentially putting the scanner on the shelf until another large mail-ballot election.

It's not uncommon for us to have mail-ballot elections for 80 or 90,000 voters--just never for 330,000.

We're bringing in a special board of about 40 employees, who will work 6-day weeks.  We're not sure if that is enough, and we'll assess that a week into this.

We're expecting an average of 10,000 ballots returned per day, but that's an average, and there is a postal holiday involved, too.  We could very well find ourselves trying to swallow an influx of 30,000 ballots on a particular day.

That's a lot of scanning, but that's even more blocking and tackling--opening envelopes, checking EVERY signature, entering the voter into our registration system.

For that, we're using every computer and every work station in every crevice of the building.

That may not be enough.

We may have to hire temporary agency employees and work two shifts, but we'll see.

In the end, we're taking a structure that is used to handling 50,000 pieces of returned mail, tops, and flexing it 6 times.  I'm not even sure Stretch Armstrong flexes that far.

There is a fair likelihood we may not have final results on election day (the election ends at noon).  If we have a big mail push that day and our special board is weary heading into the evening, they'll come back and finish the next day.

We might even assess providing results district-by-district, where only one or two might be waiting a day for unofficial results, but that may not be possible with the scanner.  For instance, in running Gardner's results, we might get exposure to interim results for another district, and that would be unacceptable.

Blogging will be impacted.  Everything will be impacted.  If nothing else, I'll be posting photos.

Tomorrow, a group of employees are going to the Pitney Bowes facility to watch them load up the envelopes.  We'll have photos from that.

New Normal, With a Short Fuse

I haven't really intended to take the month of December off so far, but such is the paradox of this blog.

It's intended to give a behind-the-scenes view of our elections, yet, as elections heat up, it's harder and harder to update.

There's much to update but this will just stick with what's continuing to be the greatest election story ever told her--the school district's mail-ballot elections scheduled for January 27.

What's important here, and we're learning this more and more each day, is the scale ahead of us.

Checking in an average of 10,000 envelopes a day requires a lot of computers, hand-held scanners, and authentication tokens into our statewide voter registration system for signature verification.  The scope of that is becoming more real to us as we devilishly hop into the details.

We processed about the same the number of returned paper ballots in 2004's presidential election that we will handled this year, but most of those ballots were in-person ballots, not requiring signature verification.

We've been so focused on the scanning of 165,000 returned ballots, we realized we haven't spent enough time on the "checking in" consideration, and even simple things like, "Do we have enough tables and chairs?" and "Are our envelope openers up to the task?" need to be explored.

There's some sort of business correlation here in that we are addressing the need to scale fast.  If this was the new normal, we'd make decisions to plan for that--automated signature verification systems, for instance.

But this isn't the new normal.  It's a spontaneous breakout--like the first time you see "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in a theater and people run out to the aisles to do the Time Warp, only to come back and sit next to you.

Before we can pick up our jaws from January and ask, "What just happened?" we'll be back in the typical world of our polls elections.

Everything we know is wrong, but just for about 60 days.  That's our new normal. 

It's the Temporary New Normal.

As Roeland Park's election concluded yesterday, the reality is, the Temporary New Normal is full-on.

Paper, Party of 330,000?

Somewhere, there will be an election administrator in a jurisdiction using paper ballots who will read this post and consider our plight child's play.

But, here we are, short-staffed and run down following the November election and in the middle of a much smaller December election in Roeland Park.

Yet, a monster set of elections await us, with ballots going out the first week of January to about 330,000 voters in five of the six school districts in Johnson County.

If half come back, we will be processing 165,000 pieces of paper, plus the envelopes, in roughly 16 days.

That's more than 10,000 ballots returned daily, and each one of the envelopes has to be checked into our voter registration system and have the returning signature matched against the voter's record.

Then, the ballots have to be scanned and tabulated.  Never having paper at the polls, at least in the last 50 years, we operate with a handful of scanners at our office.

At most, these scanners can scan 1,000 ballots an hour, but a likely throughput for the four we have is really about 2,500 an hour.

We've never processed this many paper ballots before.  Our office used paper ballots for advance voting in the presidential election of 2004, with a two-page ballot, and that resulted in nearly 200,000 pieces of paper.

That was just before I came to this job and I still hear horror tales from that process.

Job One here is to, well, get the job done.  We've never pulled something like this off before, and the fact that it falls right between two countywide elections (spring is comin') makes this even rougher.

In fact, the election itself ends the day after the spring election filing deadline.

Job Two is to get the job done as economically as possible.  Incremental costs are passed on to the school districts, while fixed costs--such as staffing and equipment purchases--are borne by the county.

So, that creates two problems for us--at least two phases of one problem and another problem, actually.

The first problem is, how many part-time election workers do we appoint to handle the load?  Part-time is likely the wrong phrase--temporary, full-time workers. We probably could use at least 75.  In November we had 12.



We only have 20 stations for envelope check-in.  We'll pretty much be needing someone sitting at those stations the entire time.

Each signature on the return envelopes must be verified.

Could we even get 75 people?  What if we needed more?  Where would they work, securely?

Can we get by with fewer, and how?

If only we had one of those fancy high-speed scanners that's being touted with some of the next-generation voting systems.  Our system isn't compatible with such a thing but if the system was, we could scan much, much faster--10,000 in just a couple of hours.

Or....

Somewhere in the Royals' World Series euphoria, we decided to take a major leap here, using an entirely new voting system for this election.  It's akin to buying a big-screen television just before the Super Bowl. 

This isn't the major leap it could be, in that we aren't going to have any election at the polls, but we are going to set up the election and operate it with a new tabulation system. The system will use a high-speed scanner.

Election administrators don't roll like this.  Where's the mock election?  What are we doing for redundancy?  These are typical, internal questions.

Our equipment vendor, to the redundancy point, is a four-hour drive away.  If the system can't be warrantied to be fail-safe for the first 20 days of its life, there's an issue there, anyway. If the system explodes, I'm sure we will have another one within a half-day.

The system has been certified federally and in Kansas, so that's not a risk.  It's just that we're making this huge transition in December for an election that will be over on Groundhog Day, the day of the elections' canvasses.

Unlike the movie, the day after Groundhog Day, and every day after, will not be the same.

Once this election is over, we'll have a high-speed taste test, an understanding of a new system that we will evaluate for our ultimate equipment replacement, and a very large paperweight until our next large mail-ballot election, likely in late 2015 or later.  It's not quite a throwaway unit, but close.

The big question is the reconciliation between the scanner costs and the savings of people.  That's roughly going to be a wash.  Remember, though, Job One is to do the job.

And this job requires that we not bring a rinky-dink scanning system to high-speed scanner fight.

So, the battle begins.  We hope to have the unit on-site this week to begin preparations.

It's funny--that Super Bowl comparison:  in November elections, the media likes to ask us is if this is our big moment, our Super Bowl.

I'm sure, given all we have going on, our staff would much rather not have this behemoth group of elections in January.  But, we've never done something like this before, and in February, conducting the canvass they day after the NFL's Big Game, we're going to feel pretty good about what we accomplished.

That sounds like a Super Bowl party to me.

Roeland Park, Part Two

Although it's been terribly long between posts, have pity, please--we started another election yesterday.

It's a special election in Roeland Park, second time this year, and comes in the most intense election period in Johnson County history.  With the November election just ending, we have this election a month later, and, on January 7, we will be mailing about 350,000 ballots for special school elections.

That election day will be about a week after the filing deadline for the spring elections.  Come April, nearly every voter in Johnson County will have had 3 elections in five months and some may have five elections in five months if we have a spring primary.

(Was that as crazy to read as it was to type?  One of our ballot envelope colors should be camouflage, to recognize ballot fatigue.)

Amidst all of this, we have some major budget deadlines ahead.  These are important because it may be 2014, but the 2016 budget gains form by March.  As mentioned in the last post, we have a lot of work to do to prepare for 2016, and the costs for that election will be much higher than in 2014.

Further, we must work on preparing our voting system request for proposal.  We were chagrined recently to learn that Sedgwick County has $4.5 million set aside for a new system.  (Actually, I'm chagrined for us but happy for them).

Douglas County had the wisdom to hire a county management leader from Johnson County a few years ago, but she took with her, apparently, the resolve to plan ahead.  Douglas County began setting aside money each year for voting systems at the same time our county manager stopped our annual set-aside amount and also pulled funding based on a quote we received, provided several times in the budget process.  We had $10 million at one time in the capital budget, but he pulled it.

Shawnee County, also, has set aside a large portion of money for its next system.

So, it's frustrating to say the least when my predecessor had the wisdom to push for and implement a plan to pay for a future system, but we are behind the other large counties in preparation years later.

This will have a major point of reckoning because even when the county issues debt to pay for the new system, it will have either a tax impact or a major cost cutting impact.  That cost cutting won't come in elections, because as we ramp up polling places and staff advance voting to 2016 levels, I estimate those additional costs to be more than $1 million from 2014.

Plus, because we will have to finance our new system, this issue also likely prevents the county from setting aside money for its next, next system.  This has created a perpetual election funding crisis.

And that's if things stay the way they are now.  Our voting machines tabulate perfectly, but reports of a vote flipping from one candidate to another--something the system has had since it was implemented in 2002--does wear us down.  Particularly, social media can turn one report into a viral epidemic.

I often talked to three or four people about the same report, and we just don't have the staff size to talk about these issues adequately, let alone address them.   It's worth considering if we need to purchase an interim solution for 2016 while we select a longer-term solution.

All of this reminds me of how, when I first came to the office 10 years ago, how the industry quaked of reports on the Black Box Voting.  There was a book of the same name.  10 years ago, that's what viral meant.

Those were the days.

Still, we're presented with an opportunity, really.  Many voters want paper, others want better touch screens, and I want a system that is easier to maintain.  Age is a relentless beast, for humans and machines, and the clock is ticking on the useful life of our system.

Legislators know this.  I just spoke at a conference of staffers put on by the National Council of State Legislators.  Two of those staffers were from Kansas, and they are coordinating an a task force of legislators looking at combining spring and fall elections.

I'm attending the meeting tomorrow, and speaking next month.  My patter is familiar--spring elections in odd years move to fall in odd years, leaving each year with August and November elections.  In conjunction with this, require that all schools be closed on election day in November and available as polling places.

One thing that has struck me, since the Black Box Voting days, is that, well, viral campaigns reach a lot of people.  We all vote, and many of us have opinions on the best way to vote (paper, machine, Internet, you name it).

There isn't much consensus on the best method, today or tomorrow.  Add in layers of policy makers, who have their own opinions and their own cost and social drivers and restrainers, and the chance of a common approach in the country, or even in a state, seems unlikely.

I'm still a believer that there will be a big bang, a disruptive moment in the industry--perhaps a single state legislature will pass a little bill requiring Internet Voting, or emailing of ballots.  All the work of standards, scientists' theories, and activist interests will go out the window.

Likewise, the opinions of election administrators will matter little in such a scenario.  Somewhere, we have to find a way to make the realities of today merge to lead to a solution.  My little presentation included here is hard to follow unless you were at the meeting this week (and even then....), but I'd be glad to explain it further if you email or comment.

For now, back to the elections.

Voting Equipment Considerations from briandnewby

You Get a Car! You Get a Car!

It's been quite a while between posts and that is a fallout from many, many moving pieces we're chasing right now.

The moving pieces bring up a political thought, not in the purest political sense but closer than others this blog has addressed.  I'll explain.

First, it may seem all non-Election Commissionery and all, but I like to watch Family Guy.  Maybe it's because the dog is named Brian. 

In any event, there is an episode where the characters play out the movie Star Wars.

Stewie, as Darth Vader, gets a briefing on security and learns of a tiny vulnerability in the Death Star, where if a missile entered this area at just the right trajectory (a 0.01 chance of happening, he's told), the entire planet-sized ship would explode.

"I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask," Stewie says, "but what's the 0.01?  That sounds like a pretty big design flaw.  Can't we board it up or, you know, put some plywood there?"

I don't observe anything as dramatic as destruction of an entire ecosystem, but I do think we are going through something that I feel like I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't raise.

It's not really a problem.  I wouldn't even call it an issue.  For us, it's life, but it is a dynamic that deserves awareness.

The trigger for this is the simple fact that we have seven elections in the next four months.  Six were unscheduled.

We have the big one that everyone knows about on November 4.  Then, five school districts will each have mail-ballot question elections on the same day in January.  This, essentially, will be a full-county election, in five pieces, and is the source of many moving pieces, mostly in my mind.  The elections carry equal parts excitement and panic, but I expect excitement will prevail.

Those elections were prompted by state legislation that allowed the schools to modify their budget formulas, but the elections were required to be mail-ballot elections.  Mail-ballots may have been the best method for the schools, but making them special elections shifts the cost from a pile-on to an existing county election, where there would be no cost, to an expense of nearly a million dollars.

This is the rub (and not yet the "political" part of this post).  Elections cost a lot of money because we have a lot of people in the county.

If Oprah Winfrey drew a winner from her audience and that winner got a new car, that would be expensive--a $25,000 prize.

But when Oprah gives one to everyone--"You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car," the overall cost balloons.  It's just math.

So, an election that costs about $3 per voter reflects 21st century costs of paper, envelopes, postage, and persons to scan the ballots.  But, if you turn to 375,000 people and say, "You get a ballot, and you get a ballot, and you get a ballot..." the overall cost balloons.

Math, it turns out, works the same in elections as it does with Oprah.

There can be debate whether an election should be a stand-alone, or added to an existing one, and that's really the area of awareness that should be raised.

But the idea that elections are expensive?  Of course they are, because there are a lot of people involved.

(We've been looking at some old budgets and realized that our 2014 county expenses for elections will be the same as 1999's.  Office expenses aren't the driver in election costs--the number of participants are).

It links to my ongoing belief that the cost of elections in Johnson County should be itemized on the property tax bill, as allowed by Kansas law and done in other large counties in the state.  Such itemizing would cause some to be concerned about how little is spent on elections, some will be concerned with how much is spent, and this overall transparency and discussion, in my view, is government goodness.

As we go to the Board of County Commissioners for money related to these elections (with much of the cost later reimbursed by the jurisdictions), I'm sure the overall cost of the elections will surprise some.

Back off the overall cost--a function of the number of voters--and question, more, this:  should something be done to limit special elections?

This isn't a question related to the school districts, except that it might drive more discussion on moving spring elections in odd years to the fall of odd years, obtaining a school holiday to use the schools as polling places, and, perhaps, having a more timely way for jurisdictions to utilize scheduled elections in the future rather than conduct special elections.

But we just found out that we needed to add into the mix of our November, then January (and the March and April) elections a special election in Roeland Park.

Roeland Park has a city council vacancy and is the only city in the county that fills these vacancies with special elections.  This will be the second election of this type in Roeland Park this year and the fifth special election in my 10 years because someone has not fulfilled the full term in office.

We have that election in December now, completing the Election of the Month trajectory.  It gets in the way, operationally, as we prepare for the school district mail-ballots and will cost the city about $5,000.

The alternative--and this finally leads to the political thought--would be the city council or the mayor appointing a replacement until the next election.  Many cities do this.

Personally, I'm not a fan of that, and not because I'm on some business development bender at the election office.  I just think that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be selected by, well, the people.

I also left my position early while on Shawnee's City Council when I was appointed election commissioner.  I didn't have to, but I thought it would eliminate any potential conflict of interest.

Point is, I'm not judging anyone for not fulfilling their term.  And, there's a large part of me that thinks that Roeland Park has it right, so there's no judgment there, either.

But, like Stewie, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't point this out.  When people wonder what election administrators do on the other 364 days when there isn't an election, they are usually surprised to find that we average an election about every two months and that more than half of our elections are unscheduled, special elections.

But the conversation stops there.  The cost of the elections is the elephant in the room.

Better yet, the cost of the elections is the flea in the room, hardly noticeable when there is one but difficult to ignore when there are nearly 400,000 in the room.

The issue here is that there are nearly 400,000 voters in our county, several jurisdictions, and probably a better and more economical way to make the government for the people more affordable to the people.



Not the same elephant/flea
concept in elections that is
discussed in this book, but
you try and find a royalty-free
Star Wars or Family Guy image!
(Besides, this book is a good read).

Maybe we should have quarterly, countywide scheduled elections and if something misses, it must wait.  Or, maybe two of those would be mail-only and the parameters of the state's mail-ballot elections would change (currently, mail-ballots can only be for issues, not people).

It's time for a broad and thoughtful discussion of this, with the overall community, not just among election administrators.

Part of election geekery, in fact, is the discussion of, "Is there a better way?"

Is there a better way, for instance, to present items on the ballot?  Is there a better way to get the word out?  Is there a better way to streamline the voter experience?

These are questions we consider for fun.

This one requires a larger net, partnering with legislators, and engaging cities and voters.

The county clerks in Kansas have created a mail-ballot election task force and I'm co-chairing it, although you wouldn't know it because we haven't met yet.  Why?  Because we have so many elections; we're all too busy.

When we do meet, I plan to expand the scope of our thinking to cover these aspects.

In the meantime, the Election of the Month Club awaits!

Leaving My iHeart in San Francisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if we had more than one system?

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

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

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

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

Mind blown.

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

iSaw it and iRegistered it.

Let's Play Two!

We're sitting on the eve of our first day-night doubleheader in Johnson County elections.

At noon, a special mail-ballot election in Fairway will close and we hope to have results out by early afternoon.

Meanwhile, polls (or a poll) open(s) at 7 a.m. in Roeland Park for a special election to select a council member for a vacated seat.

That election closes at 7 p.m.  Some in our office will come early, some will stay late, and a few of us will be there wire-to-wire.

Roeland Park is the only jurisdiction in Johnson County that fills vacated seats by election.  The rest of the cities appoint replacements, either for the remainder of the term or until the next city election.

Personally, I'm a "will of the people" kind of guy.  I think it's cool that the citizens pick their representatives.

It is, though, the fourth election of this type that Roeland Park has had in my nine years here and sixth since 2000.  Roeland Park also had a special mail-ballot election earlier this year.

A fair conclusion you may be drawing, or at least posing as a question, is why couldn't the Roeland Park elections be mail-ballots?

Simply, in Kansas, mail-ballot elections are for issues, not people.

That inefficiency is illuminated a bit with the statutory requirement that we have advance voting for every polls election of at least one week.

I've only been following the number anecdotally--for reals tomorrow--but I think we had 7 in-person advance voters over that week.

Such turnout numbers are factors for looking, again, at the potential for mail-ballot elections in Kansas.  The Kansas clerks association has created a task force--and named me co-chair (that's what I get for being out of the room).

I'm not an advocate of all-mail elections.  Mostly, I have just heard enough opinions from a cross-section of our voters to know that many (at least 7 in Roeland Park, for instance) prefer to vote in-person.

I do think it's worth looking at all-mail elections as an option for counties or jurisdictions in special elections.  For small elections, mail-ballot elections end up less costly (still about $4 per registered voter, though).

But, in the world of costly elections or, in this case, NOT COSTLY elections--I bring you the city of Shawnee:

See, the city was on the even-year election cycle, where elections were not countywide.  This meant that the city paid for elections that otherwise would be free if held in odd years.

I saw this expense immediately upon coming to the election office from Shawnee's city council and began telling anyone who cared about these unnecessary expenditures.

The city changed the cycle and, in 2013, held its first odd-year city election under the new cycle.  So, as 2014's spring invoices are being prepared, nothing for Shawnee!

Let's see:
2012 Shawnee Primary and General Election Expense:  $112,729.30
2014 Shawnee Primary and General Election Expense:  $0

To quote an obnoxious car dealer here in Olathe, "That's real money, folks."

And, Shawnee was one of five cities in the spring of even years when I came and the only one of the five to move to the odd years so far.  Maybe this real-life savings will inspire the others to hop to the land of the free (elections).

So, let's hear it for the home team!  (At least, that's MY home team).

As for tomorrow, I'm not sure who the home team is in the doubleheader, but, here's hoping the turnout in Roeland Park's election represents plenty of......wait for it......Visitors.

It (Really Is) Election Day!

Today is an election day, Olathe mail-ballot election, and a good day for a couple of snippets.

As I write this, at 1:13 p.m., I'm hearing someone at the front counter dropping off a ballot for the election that closed at noon, with results posted to our web about a half hour ago.

That's unfortunate, of course.  This is a real voter who for what likely was a legitimate reason, did not have a vote count because he delivered his ballot after the election closed.

This was not an issue with the post office.  Regular readers of this blog know that I'm pretty harsh with our local post office, so I feel obliged to trumpet the local post office's great work in this election.

I'm happy to report that during this election, the Olathe Post Office has been stellar.  We received ballot delivery early each morning in a special run.  They called us today after the delivery to say they had one ballot in addition to those delivered, and they brought it.

It's been a great change.  That's not all of the postal news here, though.

Before I went out of the country to observe the presidential election, in fact, I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal that linked to all of my previous post-office and traveling thoughts.

First, being a world traveler and all now, I was intrigued that the article came from London, speaking to the Royal Mail service.

(Speaking of world travel, I actually have a follow-up post to the Georgia visit that I offered to be reviewed by PAE-REACT before posting.  They are crazy busy and I'm sure will be back in touch soon.  So, that piece is coming.)

One of my thoughts when reading about the United State's Postal Service's financial woes has been that the Postal Service leadership has poorly managed things.  I believe the United State Postal Service is doing little to change the trajectory of its losses, either because the service is poorly managed or because the leadership is either hoping for a bailout or to make some other point with Congress.

If we ran a business that lost billions, we'd do what we could to change things, rather than just put our hands up in the air.  I think there is much more in the control of the leadership than they suggest.

Plus, I postulated during a meeting with PEW in August, "What if the post office privatized?"   To my dismay, it wasn't the type of question that pumped up the room.  It didn't even pump me up, and I asked it.  So, maybe it was just the (wait for it....) delivery.

I was just trying to think of creative ways things might change going forward--it's too easy to suggest that voting by mail will cease at some point because of the Postal Service's downward spiral.

So, in response to my August question, I bring to you the Wall Street Journal article:  The Royal Mail did privatize, not without issue, but, hey, that wacky ElectionDiary guy isn't completely in left field, after all!

Speaking of left field, I also share with you some of an email we received a week ago.  We often hear that we could do more to get the word out for an election and we all know the value of outreach, but it's not uncommon for us to be taken to the woodshed for not telling a voter that there wasn't an election.

We have had voters complain to us that we should send a mailing to let them know they didn't have an election.  Really.

Here's an email from someone we missed:

I was unable to find the post card that was sent to me but I went to the Johnson County website and put in my first name, last name, and polling place.  The site returned (a specific polling place). When I went to (it), they told me that there is no polling place.  Why is the website providing incorrect information? This is infuriating... If a voter loses that card, the website is a natural backup. If the website is not providing correct information then you are FAILING the voter. I called the Johnson County Elections phone number and got a recorded message. How do you not provide a live voice on election days (held once a year) to aid the voter.  This is a BIG FAIL by Johnson County. 

 

We did email him back and haven't received a response again.  It is a bit funny, but a fair issue because we are just one county in a large metropolitan area that crosses state lines.  There was a one-question election in Kansas City that day.

 

In fact, some television outlets were reporting that the Olathe election that finished today actually completed last Tuesday.

 

It also highlights a precursor to what surely will be an item in the upcoming Kansas legislative session.  I believe people are conditioned to expect an election in November.  We in the industry know that, at least in Kansas, November elections only occur in even years.  Most voters don't know that.

 

Heck, it took me four years working here before I figured out that leap year was always a presidential election year.  That's obvious trivia even many election geeks don't know.

 

Point is, in Kansas, there is a suggestion of moving spring city elections to November, and I think that's a great idea.  It certainly would have kept our emailing voter's blood from boiling last week.

 

The issue tends to get bundled with the idea of partisan elections for local races.  I don't have an opinion on that aspect, other than that I think the two thoughts should be kept separated.  There are good administrative reasons to move the spring elections to November.

 

One last odd thing about today.  Some local schools, in session yesterday, are out today, a Tuesday, in November.  I'll have an update soon on schools but, in my view, this only supports that having an election school holiday in November (maybe part of that legislative action I just mentioned) is very viable.

 

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.

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.

Shaking Off Europe Into Election Day

It's election day here and in many parts of the country, and I am back in the office equally refreshed and exhausted from a trip to Europe.

Here, we have an Olathe School Mail Ballot election closing at noon.  Mail-ballot elections pay the postage for the voter to return ballots and typically have higher turnouts than elections at the polls.

We've noticed the turnout waning, though.

My first month on the job, we had three mail-ballot elections, and the turnout ranged from 43 to 55 percent in those elections.

In 2007 the Olathe School District had a mail-ballot election and the turnout was a smidge under 30 percent.

This election looks like it's on pace for a similar turnout.  That's good news, really, because of all the worries we've had with the post office.

Indeed, the Post Office Wow Factor just kept growing while I was out.  Mail-ballot election in full force, yet a week ago today we received 3 pieces of mail.

That's not 3 ballots--3 pieces!

12 trays of ballots were at the post office, but the carrier said he wasn't allowed to bring them, ostensibly because they weren't counted.

So, that's 12 trays we picked up that afternoon.  That's 12 trays of ballots that wouldn't have arrived by noon had that day been election day.  They've been more responsive and today called us to say they had two trays ready for either delivery or pickup, and we'll pick them up to begin processing them.

Cars have been shuffling through our parking lot all morning as persons dropped off ballots.

The city of Overland Park is meeting with us at 11, an hour before this election closes, to finalize planning for the city's October 8 mail-ballot election, and the city of Olathe is planning a separate mail-ballot election for later this year.

That's two more times this year to be frustrated sending and receiving ballots.  I feel like we represent "bread and butter," for the Post Office but I can't help but feel they'd prefer we weren't around.

It conjures a yarn.  In fact, I've come back from Europe with many yarns and yet election-time is a "no-yarn zone."

"Yarns," are those little one-off, somewhat interesting anecdotes and stories that might even have a point, but they are distractions when focused on a task.  We try to recognize when we're caught up in a yarn during an election, and bail out of the story.

Being out for a while, this week feels like a looooonnnnnnggggg Monday, so I need a yarn to get in the groove.  Here goes:

I'm a boring guy (if you've read this far into this post, you're probably not disagreeing).  My diet primarily consists of Diet Dr. Pepper and dairy, usually chocolate milk but, occasionally, when there was a Baskin-Robbins near our house, a chocolate shake.

When I'd come into the Baskin-Robbins and order a shake, it was a clear day-ruiner for the workers.  Their facial expressions and body language made the simple role of being a customer feel very uncomfortable.

During one visit, after making a shake, the worker turned around to start walking toward the cash register and he dropped the shake.  He groaned. 

"That's okay, it's not your fault," his co-worker said, icily.

Oh!  I got it.  That was MY fault.  I ordered the shake, my last one ever there, and this act of ordering something on the menu resulted in a floor mess and an angry glare towards me.  How thoughtless of me.

That Baskin-Robbins is closed now.  No surprise.  And that boring chocolate shake anecdote conjures up exactly how I feel with the Post Office.

How thoughtless of us to pump a half-million pieces of first-class mail through the system on behalf of voters and jurisdictions.  What are we thinking, disrupting them so?

Did I mention that Baskin-Robbins is now closed?

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.

This is Me, at 50

Amidst an election in a blizzard and a foot and half of snow last week came confirmation that we have another election, a June 11 mail-ballot election for the Olathe School District.

It's the 50th election I will have administered since coming in January 2005.  50 elections, yet only 26 were scheduled.

In fact, we've had an active election in the works my entire time here.  While three of my seven election commissioner predecessors have had longer tenures, I've administered more elections than any of them.

That's not really a point of pride because some of our staff members have been here under a couple regimes and have administered more than 100 elections.  They are the heroes.

It harkens, though, to the final habit in Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:  Sharpening the Saw.

In the book, he illustrates the person needing to cut a tree with an old saw.  When told the work may go better if the saw was sharper, the person explains that he doesn't have time to sharpen the saw.  He is too busy sawing.

Covey's point is that we must take time to sharpen the saw, actively setting aside time for renewal, preserving, enhancing, and such.  In the business world, our organizations and plans need that same reflection.

In our case, we have much sharpening to do.  There's the war on polling places, Saturday postal delivery issues (by the way, should I be comforted or terrified that the post office isn't concerned about the impact of losing Saturday delivery on elections?), aging equipment that will cost millions to replace, new technology, new potential of technology, more voters, more precincts, more unplanned elections, and more of everything, in fact, except for staff members.

We have the same number of staff we had more than 20 years ago.

We need time away from operations to strategically plan, to make sense of all of this, and set a long-term course for Johnson County's voters.  In our case, the tree we're cutting was starting to fall and we're holding it up with our left hand while sawing with our right hand.

Our county has embarked upon characteristics of a High Performance Organization, which essentially empowers employees to be leaders at all levels.  It was a popular government initiative in the late 1990s but it's being resurrected (a la sharpening the saw in art-imitating-life fashion) after several senior county leaders embarked on a similar program about 10 years ago.

Our staff is miles ahead in this regard though, as evidenced by the leadership our staff members took during our snowstorm election.  They will be pushed, however, in the second half of 2013 to take on more as we aggressively evaluate all of these drivers of our business.

That is, assuming we have a few months without an election.  That's a huge assumption.

In Covey's example, he's a bit like the YouTube video-recording bystander watching a disaster.  If he were waxing about sharpening the saw while I was cutting, I think I'd have asked him if he could stop yapping and go get me another saw.

Similarly, we're likely reaching a point where merely fine-tuning won't work.  We need a moment just to get a better saw.  At some point, and soon, we're going to need to grow our staff, not by one but by a few.  The 2012 presidential election showed us that.

Selfishly, we're hoping election 51 doesn't come until it's expected, in 2014, leaving us time to sharpen. It's probably overly dramatic to say the tree will fall otherwise, but I hope not to find out.