Election Theater, Albanian Style

Greetings from Albania!

I'm here on an election observation mission and I'll blog about the experience, just as I did last time in the Republic of Georgia, when I'm back.

I was out scouting my areas of observation today, in advance of tomorrow's election, and there were a couple of, um, observations that are safe to report early on and give a flavor of my day tomorrow.

Yes, tomorrow--Sunday--is election day.

What a great day for an election tomorrow will be.  It's debatable that Sunday is a good day, but elections over here are on Sunday for much the same reason they are on Tuesdays in the United States. This day fits with with the farming and business lifestyles of residents.

There's been a lot of talk in Kansas about the value of moving municipal elections from the spring to the fall, but these municipal elections are in June and benefit from the same thing I believe we will with elections in November:

The elections will be conducted in empty schools.  That means available polling places and no student safety concerns.

June 22, I believe, also has the longest amount of daylight in the year.  The sun was up before 5 here this morning and I'm typing outside with a bright sky at 8:15 p.m.  The polls will be open totally during daylight hours.  That's voter friendly, especially when polling places don't have lit signs to direct voters.

Of interest to me is the fact that Albania has roughly the same number of voters as we have in Kansas, but there will be more than 5,000 polling places open tomorrow.  Granted, they don't have advance voting, but that's a lot of polling places.  Some might even say that's an "adequate number."

By contrast, there's continued pressure to reduce polling places in Johnson County.

Mind you, that pressure isn't coming from voters or citizens (who just named the convenience of polling places as one of the 5 best things offered by the county in the most recent citizen satisfaction survey).

It's not being pressed by the highest elected official in the country--president Barack Obama formed a commission based on long voting lines in 2012 and declared, after the commission's findings, that no one should wait more than 30 minutes to vote.

It's not being pressed by election administration officials, well-represented, in fact, on the president's commission.

In any event, these opinions exist, in part because of a lack of understanding how polling places are assigned.  Our most common complaint we hear from voters is, "why did my polling place move?" followed by "why do I drive past one polling place to get to mine?"

I have never had a voter, however, in my 10 1/2 years as election commissioner, call, write, or say in a meeting to me that we had too many polling places.

Not one.

Oh--did you hear something?  That was my microphone drop on the issue.

After a two decade trend of increasing polling places in Johnson County we went from 286 polling places in 2004 to 212 in 2012, and we found that we cut too much. Other communities cut as well in this time, and it's no coincidence that line concerns became a national topic.

I don't know how many polling places we will have yet for 2016. We will target 300 but that's so we might net 250, or 225. We can talk about 212 being the minimum, but we work with what's available, and we might find that 212 is aggressive, necessitating either us leasing hotel meeting room space as polling places in some cases or paying more for advance voting sites in order to ensure we have large advance sites.

Either way, we won't be reducing for the sake of reducing, or growing for the sake of growing, for that matter.

We match voters to facilities, just as they did here in Albania.

Today, I visited four polling places not a block apart, not next door to each other, but in the same school campus, technically in the same building!

Each polling place is supporting about 1,000 voters, the number we use as our high-water "expected to vote" amount in Johnson County.

Did you just hear a squeal?

That was speaker feedback as I picked the microphone back up and dropped it again.  It was nice to bump into a community that made such an effort to make voting accessible.

Polling places aside, the most fun thing to share today are photos from how I'll spend by night, from about 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday night after reporting for duty Sunday at 6:00 a.m.

The votes will be tabulated in central counting rooms.  The ones I saw today are small theaters, with the counting on stage and show on large televisions.

High tech and voter transparency, my two favorite things.  The seats look comfy, too.  I didn't see a place to store my fountain drink, though, in the armrest.

So, just sharing for fellow election geeks out there.   More afterwards!

Play Ball!

Here in Kansas City, we are the proud fans of the defending American League champions, the Kansas City Royals.

The last year that could be typed, the Internet wasn't even a gleam in the eye.

Who knows, if we wait another 30 years to say it, we will be communicating, maybe, through gleams in our eyes.

In any event, the Royals were 90 feet from tying the game in the bottom of the 9th inning of Game 7 and, had they done that, who knows?  They might not have been the best team in baseball, or lost the World Series to the best team in baseball, but in October at least, the Royals and the San Francisco Giants were the two best teams in baseball.

The Royals are playing like defending champions this year, with the best record in the American League one-third of the way into the season.

As the All Star Game approaches, and fan balloting cascades, it would be reasonable to think the Royals would be well-represented in the fan vote.  The Royals are good, and they became America's darlings, to a degree, because, well, most of America didn't know Kansas City had a baseball team until last October.

What's this have to do with elections?

This year, fan balloting is entirely on the Internet.

This year, if voting ended today, we would see a Royals player starting at almost every position.

That's exciting here.  I remember years where the Yankees or Red Sox or Mariners dominated the roster, and those teams were good then.  This doesn't seem surprising to me, and I'm just glad to be a lifelong Royals fan.

But this year, because of the wrinkle of Internet voting, the whole thing is wrong.  Or, at least that's what the national sports media things.  Something must be done, say baseball purists.  Fans are unfairly voting for the Royals players too much!

Internet voting advocates should take note.  This is a tiny piece of what would happen in the real world.

Candidate A wins a city council race.  It must be because the Internet voting was rigged.

I often point out, and no one seems to listen, that we should be thankful for our old, falling apart voting equipment.  We know the objections with what we have.  With new technology, we will face a whole new round of wild claims and voter concerns.  Some will be valid, but most will not.

It will be Black Box Voting all over again.

Black Box Voting times 1,000, Cartman from "South Park" might say.

One thing with the All Star voting--what if they didn't give updates?  I understand that the "who is winning" stories are designed to stir interest in the sport, but would the Royals players have the same lead if all of the results were an election-night surprise?

Academy Award voting is done on the Internet--"And the Oscar goes to...."--no claims of wrongful voting there.  There were gripes of the usability or the age old "did my vote really count?" question, but the All Star voting questions are new.  Maybe the updates are to blame.

Regardless, the All Star game points out that society thinks it's normal to vote over the Internet.  No one is complaining that paper-based balloting is the way to go.  The complaints are more about control of the number of votes someone is allowed to make.

The other elephant in the room with Internet voting is the continued cyber attacks on systems.  When the IRS is attacked, it makes it harder to suggest that a voting system couldn't be hacked.

All of this just points out what we election administrators have always known:  there is security and there is the perception of security, procedures we follow to give voters more confidence that votes are secure.  Without voter confidence, we have nothing.

It is with that thought that I leave soon to observe local elections in Albania.  The mere presence of observers instills voter confidence of a fair election.  Any system, even the the All Star voting online, must be open to scrutiny.  Even, more than anywhere else in fact, the system in Johnson County must face that scrutiny, in my opinion.

Transparency is the key to fair elections, just as it is the key to good government.

I expect to come back with ideas to further increase transparency in our election process and am anxious to begin applying those learnings upon my return, just in time to learn the final results of the fan voting.

I'm taking Royals trinkets as gifts for our interpreter and driver.  If the Internet results are real, these will be the only 2 people in the world who can't rattle off the starting lineup of the Royals.

Things Got Busy

Long time readers of this blog likely know that when the postings become less frequent, it's a sign that we are extremely busy, and such a thing has happened again.

Just a couple of weeks ago, things looked as though we wouldn't have an election until the spring of 2016.

Now, we have a recall election scheduled for August 18 and a Gardner mail-ballot election expected on September 15.  That will give us nine elections so far this year, tied for the most ever in one year with 2005, my first year here.

The 2014 and 2015 total now is at 16 elections, the most in a two-year period ever.  That's more than an election every other month. (Okay, okay, you can do math, too--it's two elections, on average, skip a month, two months, skip a month, and so on).

But as much as that crazy keeps on giving, it's that time of year again to focus on the budget, and we are preparing for our June 11 budget presentation to the Board of County Commissioners. 

Our biggest economic issue is how we'll handle the expected 80 percent voter turnout we'll have in 2016.  That's what we had in 2008, factoring in provisional ballots, and 2016 looks to be a repeat.

The county has bet the farm (or at least used House Money) on renovating a bowling alley and making it a cultural arts center that moonlights as an advance voting site.  It likely won't be ready for 2016's elections, though.  Other sites we had won't be available, either.  Metcalf's location was temporary and the Great Mall of the Great Plains is closing.

Of course, advance voting is required to take place in our office, but our office can't handle the volume of voters it gets.  Our office isn't even compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, particularly in that persons with a wheelchair needs assistance getting in the building and using the men's restroom.

Pointing out things like this year after year doesn't raise my popularity with county officials at the administration building, but we will be raising it this year again, especially given the concerns about polling places as well.

With any luck, the new state bill, just passed and expected to be signed into law soon, that moves municipal elections to the fall and requires schools to be available as polling places will result in more schools available for use in 2016. 

I type "with any luck" because the language in the bill is more of the "strongly recommends" than "strongly requires" variety.

Next year will be the first presidential election following the Presidential Commission on Election Administration's report that recommended voters not wait more than 30 minutes to vote.  I presented to a group of clerks in Wichita on Friday and pulled up some of the survey material from that report.   It's been a while since I've thought about this and, as a result, looked at the data fresh-faced.

I giggled when realizing that the survey brought to light the insight that 56 percent of election administrators felt the reason for lines in 2012 was that a bunch of people came to vote at the same time.

I was reminded of my time on the city council in Shawnee when a fellow council member approved expansion of the landfill only under the condition that a study be undertaken to determine why the landfill emits odors.

Duh, it's a LANDFILL!  I think it emits odors because people dispose of trash there, and trash stinks.

(I interrupt this post so you may insert an obligatory correlation to landfills and politics here--you know, Dear Reader, you want to.  I'll wait...)

Anyway, I'm not sure how the 30-minute thing will play in Peoria, let alone Olathe.  I don't think we'll find the budget relief we'll need related to the 30-minute guideline and, further, I expect the 30-minute guideline will be used unfairly against an election administrator somewhere next November.

For now, we plan to trial electronic poll books in the recall election to determine the feasibility of using them next year.  I'm not sold at all that electronic poll books address line issues, but they may cut down on provisional ballots issued because voters are at the wrong polling place.

I am optimistic that we'll have enough polling places that it will be even possible for voters to go to the wrong one. 

To that point, we also caught up with the owner of Textcaster, the company that we have worked with to create a text messaging lookup tool to get people to the correct polling place.  That's been a successful tool since 2007.  We have some exciting things planned with him that deserve a post all of their own, so that will come soon.

Lastly, because chaos is my friend apparently, I soon will be traveling to Albania for an election observation mission.  That will lead to some more dark moments, but I'll be blogging from there as I can as well.

My international mission to the Republic of Georgia led to ideas and new practices, so I'm sure this will, too.  In particular, I think we can learn a lot from these elections in terms of election worker training and processes poll agents. 

It's been a year.  Well, actually, it's still spring, but 2015 has felt like a whole year.  No summer vacation here--more updates soon.