Around the County in (1)80 Days

With the April election behind us, it's time to move, guns blazing, into our next election.

Wait a minute....we don't have a next election.

Well, technically, we always have a next election.

It's one of the axioms of life.

There's always room for jello.

You're never really finished with laundry.

There will always be another election.

But in our case, that next scheduled election is April 2016.

We may have one before then.  There is an active recall effort underway in a school district, and there is some talk that Shawnee may fill an open city council seat with an election.

Still, right now, we aren't working on an active election.  That's the first time I've been able to say, or type, that in my 10 years and nearly four months on the job.  Others in the office who have been here longer are disheartened when they hear this, because for them, it's been even longer.

Unless the Shawnee election comes to pass as real this week--we're finalizing all work on April's election--I will declare the streak over and, as far as I can tell, it's about a 20-year streak.

In odd years, there isn't an election more than 5 months apart since 1997, and even then, we don't know now when staffers were aware that election was forthcoming.

So now, when it would appear to be the slowest time we've had in years, it's time to get extremely busy.  We have much work to do in the next six months, roughly 180 days.

Six months from today's date, November 26, will be Thanksgiving Day.  That triggers the holidays where December is often a lost month, time to move the ball through a month that has many personal events.  May is much the same way, with graduations and end of school-year functions.

But we're in crunch mode.  We've undergone some staff retirements, a death of a key staff member, and some much needed staffing changes to bring in the right mindset as we approach 2016.  We have much more to do, with two new vacancies pending, and hope to be fully staffed by this summer.

As part of that, we're focused on a very basic problem.  Where will people vote in 2016?

We have shrunk down to 175 polling places, from 286 in 2004.  If we were on the trajectory of polling place growth under my predecessor (tied with population growth), we'd be at around 350 polling places right now.

We need about 100 more for the expected turnout.  We won't get them, so advance voting will even be more important than ever.

Oh, and we've lost two of our four advance voting sites.

Job one is to review our polling places, a refreshed look at disability accessibility, parking, voting accommodations, and other factors.

We'll be going around the county in 180 days evaluating voting locations.  Jules Verne figured out how to go around the world in 80 days, but we're working--it'll take longer.

In the meantime, we'll be picking up our efforts to recruit election workers, beginning training as soon as possible, well before Thanksgiving perhaps, to be ready for 2016.

2016 is breathing down our neck.  We have six months before the self-induced winds of change shift to the turbulence from the outside world.

How we respond to that turbulence will come down to how well we focus now.

Two Words, Many Views

King Louie.

Few short phrases conjure quick thoughts in Johnson County like King Louie, particularly these days.

In Kansas City in 1980s and 1990s, King Louie Lanes were all over town, and one very large megacenter, with an ice rink and billiards, was in the heart of Johnson County.

To many long-time Johnson Countians, "King Louie" is a phrase that immediately recalls an image of this center.  ABC's Wide World of Sports, when that was a thing, broadcast national bowling tournaments--when those were things--from King Louie's Metcalf location, when that was a thing.

Yet, King Louie isn't much of a thing these days to most Johnson Countians.

Among those most wired with Johnson County politics, that phrase creates an instant reaction. The county purchased this site a few years ago on about as much of a lark as a $3 million investment can be.

Take away the few dozen most wired with Johnson County politics, that phrase, though, likely just brings up some sentiment of moment spent there, often from a high-school party.

I see that phrase and I always think, "The Jungle Book."  Then, again, that's what I thought any time I passed a King Louie facility in the 1980s and 1990s.

Point is, the King Louie property is hyperly tuned into some because of the recent purchase, but the average Johnson Countian internalizes "King Louie" more than considers what the county is doing with this facility.

Yet, this property, since its purchase, has sat in limbo--the initial vision wasn't grounded enough to allow it come to fruition and yet repurposing the building requires investment that, to some, seems like throwing good money after bad.

The Election Office has been marginally conjoined with this property.  Possibly, this facility may be able to be used as one of the county's advance voting locations, but I first became aware that this was a reason for the purchase of the property about two hours before the concept was presented to the Board of County Commissioners a few years ago.

This past Thursday, the Board reviewed a very impressive, well-coordinated pitch on a new view of the center's future.    The total cost of plan, counting the earlier investment, is about $22 million.

Personally, if the County feels this facility meets needs and it has the money, I am extremely neutral to the whole idea.  I'm never jealous for others achieving their dreams; I just want to achieve mine, too.

My dreams are pretty basic and linked to 2016, mostly.

Speaking of 2016--looking at the turnout from the 2008 presidential election (79 percent) and the number of polling places (284 compared to 182 this past November), and considering the potential for historical firsts if candidates in both parties become the eventual presidential nominees, our cost for the presidential election will be at least $2 million more than the 2014 election.

This isn't from discretionary spending.  It's akin to "keeping the lights on," a phrase often used by our budget office and the county manager.

We will need at least 100 more polling places, and there's nothing to suggest we can find that many.

We will then need more advance voting sites, and there's nothing to suggest that's possible.  At the very least, we will be paying much more rent for advance sites than we did in 2008.  Our election workers will need to have their training costs at least adjusted for minimum wage and they really could use a raise--they haven't had one since 2006.  Postage is likely to increase.

The Non-Jungle Book Version of King Louie

Still, the hard-wired, non-negotiable cost increase will be at least $2 million.  Other operational needs--headcount to avoid the kind of crisis we experienced with a death in the office right at a critical time--are more negotiable.  They're real, but more discretionary.

Those $2 million costs don't seem to be on anyone's radar so I'm telling everyone I can at every chance I can.  (Yes, Dear Reader, you are inside the Looking Glass at this very moment).

As long as this property doesn't get in the way of elections, such a basic--the basic--piece of government, who am I to complain?

Still, of the $2 million "keep the lights on," amount, King Louie has the chance to mitigate just $25,000 IF we can use the facility for the August and November elections.

We use the same locations for both elections, so King Louie is of no use to us in November 2016 if it isn't available until July for us to set up for August.  Otherwise, our first time there will be August 2018.

This represents my rub with this issue.  A savings of $25,000 every other year, in today's dollars, as providing one advance voting location--not all advance voting, but one of at least 4 sites--is relatively small in terms of the total project costs.  Yet, advance voting is listed as a primary reason for investing in the facility.

It's not lost on me that while there was an orchestrated presentation to the Board, I wasn't asked to be part of this pitch.  Hopefully, others noticed that as well.

The need, though, to have it sooner so we can use the facility in 2016 was well-represented by the county's Bureau Chief.  Two of the Commissioners did bring up my concern in the meeting, and I talked with another before the meeting.

I think that everyone involved is on board with my 2016 concerns.  And, full circle, if we get the advance voting facility, that will be a nice thing.  It's not an advance voting panacea.  But, one less thing, that's for sure.

We spend a lot of cycles trying to negotiate advance voting sites.

We may be at place very soon where we have 10 advance voting locations because we we are losing polling place locations faster than we are getting new one.  Having one good-sized advance voting site in the can will never be bad.

In that regard, as my version of King Louie would say, "I'm tired of monkeying around." There will be less of that if we have this facility.


(Click here to the link to the meeting--in that link is a link for the presentation, worth downloading and reviewing).

Advance Voting is Underway!

Advance voting in person begins tomorrow and if that has come up on you, dear reader, fast, it has on us, too.

We literally have been too busy to type, mostly because we've been having election worker training each day while pumping through thousands of advance voting applications and ballots.

This time is also the period for the latest installment of "People Move."

Our ballots went out Wednesday, with a couple thousand going out each day since.  Before that, however, we sent a teaser postcard to all voters to remind them of the upcoming election and their advance voting options.

This mailing list for the postcard was created in September, about a month after all changes from the August election were finalized.  Any postcard that came back undeliverable in July resulted in an updated voter record.  Provisional ballots that required address changes were updated.  New registrations were processed.

Yet, in that time, we have this, in terms of undelivered postcards:

The pictures show the same number, with the second picture just now sorted so we can begin working these.  Funny, those outside of elections have no sense of the number of transactions we process and what list maintenance means.

Further, the linkage to election offices and the mail service is incredible.  Postage is such a huge expense.  Mailing the postcard, which allows us to be compliant with the National Voter Registration Act, costs about $130,000.

Yes, that flimsy little drab postcard costs that much just to mail.  It makes you wonder how much all of the candidate campaign and Johnson County government mailings to households cost (well, it makes me wonder, but it also makes me wonder--how again is it that the post office is struggling)?

Our first day ballots are photographed in little cages.  They look tidy.

Ballots mailed Wednesday night, some
voted and returned by mail Saturday.

And, on Saturday, we already had some back in the mail!  Note, however, the small number of white envelopes.  We'll get more.  Those are ballots that were undeliverable.  We'll likely mail out about 40,000 ballots in this election and somewhere between 500 and 1,000 will come back undeliverable, which usually means that people moved between the time they requested the ballots in the last couple of weeks and the time we mailed them.

In-person advance voting will be at our office, 9800 Metcalf, the Great Mall of the Great Plains, and the Johnson County Northeast offices starting tomorrow morning.

Below are a couple of photos from this summer that I thought were worth a giggle from the Great Mall.

The first just looks funny to me because of the "Quite Please" that displays so prominently with no voters yet, as though it's an election museum.

The other is from advertisement inside the mall.  Apparently, mall management anticipates a stressful election season.

We have much going on with more updates soon.  Tomorrow night, we have election worker training for high-school students.  Tuesday and Wednesday, we have the all-important opening games of the World Series.

The last time a World Series came into play during a November election cycle in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were running.  There was no advance voting.

I do wonder how the Series could impact voting patterns.  Maybe there will not be an impact, but that seems unlikely.

My early thought is that advance voting may trend slower than it did in, comparably, 2010, with a possible pick-up late next week.  However, Halloween is on a Friday (a great late-afternoon, early evening to vote, by the way--NO lines at our office), so that will get in the way of voting.

Intuitively, I think some advancers will just wait until election day, but election day is unpredictable (and what if it's the day of the victory parade?).

Of course, our election planning is pretty baked at this point.  Polling places were secured a year ago, advance sites buttoned down in January, and all new election worker training will be over tomorrow.  We have to finish new training before the onslaught of voters to our parking lot--we don't have enough parking for new worker training AND voters.

We conduct refresher training now offsite, in classes of 250+ at a time, at the University of Kansas Edwards campus.  Moving new worker training is much more problematic because we have smaller classes and an entire "Perfect Polling Place" for skits to help the workers connect the dots.

Something's got to give on that, though, space-wise.  That's a problem to ponder in late 2015, our next chance for a breather, maybe.

Live voting engines start tomorrow.

Photos above and below from the Great Mall.

Party of 380,000 With No Waiting?

In the spirit of "a picture is worth a thousand words," the table below says a lot, but I still will need to add a couple of hundred words of color for the full effect.

"Table" in this Thanksgiving post relates to a text-based table.  But, it's worth comparing our situation to a restaurant maitre d' hoping to accommodate a large party.

The table represents a response from one of our school districts regarding school availability for 2014's elections.  The district has been very responsive to our requests, but the table highlights polling place issues on many levels.

First, know that the April election only encompasses four cities and only some portions of one of those cities spill into this school district.  The February election is a primary, if needed, for any of those four cities.

The August election is a countywide primary and the November election is a countywide general election.

Our objective is to keep voters at the same location throughout an entire cycle.  We often get complaints that polling places move frequently, and if you lived in this school district, the table below gives you a pretty good indication why they move ("X" indicates facility availability):

	2/25/14	4/1/14	8/5/14	11/4/14
ABM Gym	X	X	X	X
BVA Gym	X	X	X	X
BVM Gym	X			X
HMS Gym				X
LKM Gym	X	X		X
LMS Gym Foyer	X	X
OTM Gym				X
OMS South Foyer				X
PRM Gym	X
PSM Gym
BVH Front Foyer
BVN Aux Gym	X	X	X	X
BVNW Library Foyer				X
BVSW Aux Gym				X
BVW Aux Gym	X	X	X	X

So, of the 15 sites above, only four are available for all four elections and, actually, for the two big ones as well.  Further, only two of the four meet our needs as polling places.  

On the good side, all four are gymnasiums, so they have plenty of space.  However, one, "BVM Gym," was an extremely high-volume location in the presidential election with 10 voting machines and nearly 3,000 registered voters.  Those voters need a new home, at least for August.  If we only send them elsewhere for August, but back home in November, we'll field at least 100 complaints and we don't exactly have enough people to answer the phones on slow days.

(As an aside, we have an extremely clear-cut vision for our website:  to reduce phone calls.  This isn't flippant.  We don't have enough people to answer the phone.  We'll get 8,000 calls on election day, for instance.  Our site is essentially a reference tool where we try to guess/predict the various needs stakeholders have and provide as much self-service information as possible).

Back to the key polling place point--through 2008, our office (and, I think most others) demonstrated election service by the number of polling places utilized.  The number always increased, presidential election to presidential election.

The new paradigm is, "How few polling places can we utilize and still administer the election?"

It's akin to my Sprint days, late 1990s, when our revenue per minute was dropping.  The "Dime Lady" was an icon by then as our customers were pushing for three-cents-per-minute domestic rates.  Someone piped up in a room that soon we will be talking minutes per cent, instead of cents per minute.  

That was a revolutionary thought--and correct.  It drove different behavior.

Where I thought once that we'd be up to 300 polling places in 2016, we've got to consider what would happen if we only had 100.

Of the 300, they'd be evenly split between schools, churches, and "other."  "Other" includes banks, restaurants, senior living centers, and VFW Halls.  

Without schools--and we're headed that way unless we can get spring elections moved to November and a school holiday for voting--we're left with churches and "other," and "other" is a tenuous category, subject to economic and capacity issues.  A senior living center, for instance, may contain 700 registered voters, but few nearby voters can be assigned because there may only be five public parking spaces.

And, of course, our advance voting sites are in peril, too.  Our location in Shawnee is now a toy store, and there are fewer open storefronts than there were in 2007, or 2011 for that matter.

It's a stresser.  We have a party of 380,000 we need to seat.  They're willing to be split up, but they'd like to eat on the same day, if possible.  

We don't exactly need a bigger boat, but we definitely are going to need more boats than it's looking like we'll have.

The King and I

Last Thursday, members of the Board of County Commissioners effectively slow-rolled and maybe stopped the restoration of the "King Louie" facility.

The site is a former bowling alley and ice rink, purchased at what appears to a be below-market price, for relocation of the Johnson County Museum and potential creation of a special suburbia museum. 

As the project gained potential traction, other uses for the facility were identified.  It is, after all, a huge complex with plenty of parking.  ABC used to broadcast "Wide World of Sports" Bowling Championships from this site back when ABC, "Wide World of Sports," and bowling all were things people cared about.

Advance voting was added to the list of potential uses.  Actually, I barked a bit about that initially because I didn't think enough was being done to truly address our advance voting needs if, indeed, it were to be used this way.

The county's facility department met with me and we spent considerable time conceptualizing what would be a very workable but modest advance voting site (comparable to what we do at Metcalf South, across the street and used in even years since 2006--however, we never know when our last election there will be our last and the shopping center will be demolished).

From the election office standpoint, I was fine with the plan.  Separately, I saw the arguments on all sides of this purchase. It wasn't my role to have a position on that.

Just before last Thursday's meeting ended, one commissioner suggested a task force be formed of the various building stakeholders to consider the fate of this property.  That suggestion didn't make it to a vote, but one might come up in a regular commission meeting.

I've toured the facility.  I see the warts and I see the potential.  No one asked me, and even if they do it might be a pity postulate request, but here's what I would do.

1. I'd move the election office there.  It's centrally located to the population in the county today, and for the foreseeable future.  It's large enough to accommodate the growth we need in our building for storage, a need nearly every commissioner and many county staff persons have concurred that we have.
   
   Doing this allows for us to consider a mega advance voting site, not one that has 25 voting machines and processes 35,000 voters over two weeks, but rather 100 voting machines processing 100,000 voters or more in a presidential election. 
   
   We can do it; I've done the math, and given all of the polling place and advance voting constraints we have, it's the kind of game changer that might allow us to operate with, say, 100 polling places in the county on election day.
   
   (Incidentally, if you look at strip malls and empty storefronts as I do, you'll notice there are fewer than we saw, say, in 2007.  Advance voting possibilities are hardly ample).
2. As part of the renovation, build an auditorium-type of training facility for 400, allowing us to conduct refresher election worker training at a county facility.  The building structure is conducive to this kind of idea, I think.
   
   Right now, we have to utilize churches and other facilities, and the rent for those is going up.  We're subject to limited availability and options.
   
   There is a need, I believe, within the county government structure for such a training facility beyond elections, so it would be available for other county uses as well.  We would simply have first dibs.  Further, it could be leased out to other organizations. 
3. Move the museum (which must find a home) to our current building.  The county owns the facility and it has plenty of parking for visitors in the numbers they have.  There is even the old "rectory" site adjacent to our property that the county purchased in 2012.  It could be used for better access/egress into this site.
4. Some of the other uses for the King Louie building could still be achieved.  As the Election Office, the site would be a terrific place for a transit station because it would make advance voting much more accessible.  The Enterprise Center--the county's incubator for new businesses--could still possibly have a home there and would be able to benefit from the training facility.  Who knows, we might be able to leverage some innovation into our operations as a result of that.

Of course, this all requires money, money which was expressly not pushed forward last week.  If there isn't a financing plan to use the site, though, it is my understanding that a note will come due requiring $3 million from the general fund in 2015.

So, it looks like some significant money will be spent, one way or another.

As I often say, I'm an idea guy.  Now it's just a small matter of implementation.  First, our leaders would need to buy in and, again, no one asked me.

I remind all that I am here to neither praise, nor bury, King Louie.  If the King can be part of an elections solution, though, it seems like it's worth, at least, a vote by the county's governing body.  At the very least, maybe these thoughts will be a good kickstarter for the task force suggested.

Trolling for Advance Sites

Advance voting's biggest nemesis?

It's optimism.

Remember, this blog takes the perspective of the election administrator, not politicos.  The optimism to which I'm referring is the optimism of landlords that their vacant space will not remain vacant.

People's Exhibit A is a shopping area near my home.  The area, at 75th and Quivira, is well-located and convenient.  The shopping center is huge. 

It's also been nearly empty for five years.

We approached the leasing agents in 2007, for 2008.  We explained that we would pay rent for space and that, in November, we would be bringing in 15,000 visitors to the shopping center over a two-week period.  Surely some of them would stay and shop at the bookstore, buy a pizza, or have coffee at Starbuck's.

At one point, we were offered a tiny little sliver of a shop that would house only about 15 voting machines.  We wanted a bigger space and were told that there were plans in the works for all of the other empty storefronts.

We heard stories of the bridal shop becoming an Auto Zone, the grocery store converted to office space, and of all the shops immediately filled with tiny cottage industries.  None of this happened.

When I say these were stories, that's what they were.  They weren't plans.  They were long narratives I listened to as explanations of why we couldn't lease space.

No joke, at one point, the leasing agent of this shopping center explained that there were social issues, too.  "If I lease to you and the KKK comes in wanting space, then I'd have to lease to them," he said.

Really?  That's how your mind works?

If there's ever a signal during a conversation that "we're through here," that was it, but he said this before waxing another 30 minutes about how he knew better than the owners what would work in the (still empty) shopping center.

This brings up one of the issues with advance voting space.  We don't have a team of lease negotiators, we're a small staff, and we have to negotiate these in our spare time.

Often, this is a linear process, where we get a nibble and spend a couple of weeks trying to secure a site, only later finding out that the landlord isn't ready to commit to us.  We look for space that we can have mid-July through mid-November of even years.

It's pointless to begin talking with landlords until January.  Even then, they aren't willing to entertain the idea that the vacant space won't be filled until May or June, and that timeframe is much too late for us to wait hoping for a location.

The Dead Zone (other pictures are at the end
of the post, along with pictures of a thriving
pizza business in the middle of the cement desert).

This particular shopping center has taunted me for years.  After the 2008 election and with the center still empty, I sent the leasing agent (in Dallas) a courtesy copy of a local paper's coverage of massive advance voting turnout at another site.

We watched it empty in 2010 but were happy with our location we found a couple of miles down the road.  2012 came with no new tenants and now we're evaluating locations for 2014.  We're worried we might lose the space we had before, so we noticed new leasing agents on signs at the center and called again.

No return call.

(By the way, we've learned that "new leasing agents" often are the local leasing agents, who in turn talk to the same leasing agents we've dealt with before).

We even identified an old Kmart location that might be better.  Alas, it has the same leasing agent.  Best we can tell, this leasing agent's role is to ensure the locations stay empty.

But this is our advance voting life.

We're nearing the time to get busy identifying sites.  I stress that we pay rent (we don't really have the budget for that, but we get how the world works and we aren't expecting it to be free).

Our main competitor for space is Halloween.  We're often bumped by temporary costume stores.

If such a store opens in the tumbleweed zone up from house, that simply will validate that the leasing agent does return phone calls, just selectively.

Or, maybe we can partner with Halloween stores (as long as they greet voters on the way out, to be compliant with state law).  As the economy has improved, landlord optimism is likely to improve as well.  There is less space available now than when we started looking in 2007.

It's a bad combination, this and our polling place situation.  We just got word yesterday that we've lost several schools as polling places because of construction (but really, safety).  I'll post on that soon.

The oasis of traffic, at a family pizza restaurant.

The Answer Is...

I'm flying to Washington to participate in a meeting tomorrow with a bunch of smart people to discuss election capacity planning and election lines, organized by the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

One outcome of this meeting is potential input for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

This is the Commission formed following the President's famous (to election geeks, anyway) comment regarding lines to vote, "We have to fix that."

I've been observing comments, speakers, and stakeholders in the early days of the Commission, and I've postulated some on this before here.

"That" has been the subject of discussion, as in "what is it we are fixing?"  If we're simply fixing lines, or at least slow and long lines, it's taken me 7 months to simplify the approach, but I think it's the right mantra:

To fix "that," we need to expand hours                                         and expand options.

That's it.  Expand hours and expand options.  It's a simple vision.  It's not controversial (yet) and it's not political (yet).

I'm reminded of a time way-back-when, sitting in a long line at a bank's drive-through needing to deposit a paycheck.  It was was 5:45 on a Friday afternoon.  I finally wheeled up, with at least 100 cars behind me, to the window.

"What happens at 6?" I asked.

"Oh, WE ARE closing at 6," the teller responded.

They needed to fix that.  Remember the fight against direct deposit of paychecks?  I do.  I also remember those long lines at banks on Fridays.

Remember the long lines to check in at airports?  Okay, they're still there.

However, they do move faster because of self-service.  (Mostly) gone are the days where the person at the counter taps in some crazed cluster of keyboard strokes, waits, hits it again, waits, does a move from Twister, and then taps some more before saying, "Ok, you're checked in."

Grocery day used to be Saturday.  As a kid, forced to spend 90 minutes a week in a grocery store as my parents hunted and gathered, I joined fellow youths to terrorize adults by running through aisles, playing tag, and generally be living proof that our society had no future.

Now, grocery stores are open 24 hours a day, making anytime Grocery Time, freeing up our Saturdays to spend 10 hours in a lawn chair watching our children's sporting events in some freakish payback for being free years ago.

Thanks, expansion.

Expansion of hours and options in voting likely means an expansion in cost.  There may be some tradeoffs--fewer polling places but more advance voting sites, for instance, could maximize utilization of voting machines and stave off some investment.

With all respect to my industry friends, the answer doesn't have to be electronic pollbooks or Internet voting.  Those aren't bad items for discussion, for sure.  But, definitely, solutions should stem from innovation.

And, I argue, there has to be some element of self-service.  There's an article in USA Today that mentions concierge apps for hotels.  Isn't an election administrator really a concierge for voters?

Look at that--isn't that a more fun thought to consider than the Eeyore, "Not much of a line, but I'm sort of attached to it," contestuous approach to "what exactly is 'that'?"

The answer is......expand hours and expand options.

It's simple.  It rolls off the tongue, or at least the keyboard.

I'm looking forward to discussions on how we do it.

Pinching Voters and Budgets

This week's election contained some irony.

The election involved the Olathe School District and a capital improvement plan that passed overwhelmingly.

The projects included a new high school and improved security at all schools.

I read today that the district plans "Pinch Points" at each school.  I really like this new phrase linguistically but operationally, I think this points to further doom for us at the election office.

Pinch Points refers to the concept that visitors to a school have to come through a secure entrance, basically being buzzed in.  This, of course, would be unworkable when using schools as polling places.

Hence the irony.  An election conducted by our office for the district likely will result in the district not being able to support the election office.

I could be wrong, and, of course, this is becoming a tired message on this blog.  Namely, schools' concerns with safety, voters' concerns with churches, reduced post office service levels, and increased voter expectations for advance voting locations form the largest restrainers we have to conducting elections.

Late this year, we will go through the process of assigning polling places for 2014 elections.  That's when these points may start pinching.

This event coincides with our budget process and data related to the 2012 election.  In 2012, the county  conducted small focus groups and an online budget-cut simulation.  One conclusion drawn was that people were willing to wait in line longer to vote.  There was encouragement by the county manager and some members of the Board of County Commissioners to reduce polling places.

I was publicly skeptical of this conclusion.  In fact, the online simulation that asked residents how they would balance the budget started with questions about the election office and the DMV.  We know, of course, the impact of "top of the ballot," in elections (that's why we rotate candidate names).  The design of the simulation likely created some false positives.

The same process said that waiting longer at the DMV was okay and thanks to a new computer system put in place in 2012, the DMV's "brand" has been severely damaged.  Wait times there were measured in hours, not minutes.

Fact is, though, we were reducing polling places, anyway.  It was the first time, presidential-election to presidential-election, that polling places decreased rather than increased.  It was a signal of availability, not of my reaction to the focus groups.

I'm a pretty independent person and if I thought increasing polling places was the right thing to do, I would have, and then I would have dealt with the fall-out within the county.  I said this during my budget presentation last June.  In fairness, nobody "made me" reduce polling places.  Further, I didn't quit some polling places--they quit us.

But, now we have new data, the outcome of the semi-annual resident survey conducted by the county.  This survey has a nice trend line going since 2005 and asks residents about convenience of polling place and advance voting locations.

At my budget presentation with the Board of County Commissioners last year, I said I would use this survey data to assess if the reduction of polling places would have an impact.  I felt it would and if I wasn't the only one in the room who felt that way, I can only say that they didn't pipe up and agree with me.

But now, comes the survey data.

For the statement "Polling places in the County are convenient," satisfaction dropped, down from 90 percent in 2011 to 86 percent.  The company the county employs to do the survey defines a four-point drop as statistically significant.

The five-survey, eight-year trend goes like this:

2005      2007      2009    2011    2013
90%       88%       90%     90%     86%

This is bad news.  Residents feel polling places are less convenient at a time when we are sure to have even fewer locations available as polling places.

For the statement "The County has enough advanced voting locations," the trend is this:

2005      2007      2009    2011    2013
79%       77%       77%     76%     76%

My belief is that voters' expectations of advance voting sites are increasing.  Voters feel they shouldn't have to travel far to them and that the lines should be short.

I'm sure the push-back I would get from our county manager is that 86 percent doesn't seem that bad.  He might even point to the 2007 number showing the drop from 90 to 88 percent.  That, however, came after we experimented by reducing polling places in the 2006 election from 2004 levels.

Also, survey numbers for all items measured in the county have dropped since 2005 and that could be a sign of survey fatigue, overall economic issues impacting the frame of mind of the respondents, or specific budget cuts at the county.

But if 86 percent isn't bad, what is?  We are talking about a constitutional right, after all, with convenience required by federal and state laws.

Is 85 percent bad, or 80 percent? Is 76 percent bad?

Ah, 76 percent--the response to the advanced voting location question.  I think the answer to improving the answer to the first question comes by dealing with this question.

Point is, there likely is more than one way to address the polling place response.  The obvious one is to increase polling places.

Another, if we had a reliable post office, would be to further push voting by mail.

A third, and most timely I feel, is to improve our advance voting locations.  We either need more or larger sites.  Either will require more staff at our office to secure, manage, and operate.

We requested two more positions (replacing those cut) and signaled that we really need more, but those two positions are being recommended by the county manager as not funded.

If we could move the 76 percent closer to 80 (and maintaining it at 76 may be a win given the greater expectations), fewer voters will go to the polls and those who do go to the polls, theoretically at least, will find them more convenient.

As it is right now, we're likely to have fewer polling places, 2014 compared to 2010.  We have no satellite advance voting locations (they can't really be secured until early 2014, but it's no gimme that any of the previous locations will be available) and aren't going to get the resources to help with that.

There's nothing on the horizon, or in the proposed budget, that would suggest the survey numbers will go anywhere but down in 2015.

We might get lucky.  Despite these restrainers, we might be able to secure larger advance voting locations.  Metcalf South, always iffy if we can get it again, has other space available, although we tried to secure the larger storefront there in 2012, unsuccessfully.

Or, at least, if the numbers continue this trendline, the 2015 story will be pretty compelling (as if it isn't already) that major investment needs to be made in the county's election process, ahead of the 2016 presidential election budget process.

Advance Prep for Advance Voting

This week, I received a call from someone who was interested in helping our office secure advance voting sites.

Maybe he can help.  We'd like to go from four to six sites in 2014 but our ability to do that is dependent upon several things falling our way.

He asked about some of that.

The number one thing is that our office has to identify and negotiate property leases.  We don't have an advance voting procurement division so this is a linear effort (we chase one lead down until it dries and go after another) on the part of an assistant election commissioner and me.

That empty storefront that's been vacant for three years?  Don't even suggest to the leasing agent that it might be vacant a year from now, let alone July through November of 2014.

We can't begin to pursue sites until January and, historically, we're scrambling in April to close the deals, even as we conduct our April election.  So, we have may have grand plans to have advance locations strategically located throughout the county, but by March we'll be on a site land grab.

I equate this effort to that of a college basketball coach.  We're always recruiting.  In our case, we're always recruiting workers and locations.

If we have a chance to snag a blue chipper, even if we were after a center but get a strong shooting guard to commit, we'll pounce and recast our team and our needs going forward.  If we want a site at 135th and State Line but we get the Great Mall in Olathe, we'll build a new plan around that.

Expectations for advance voting locations have escalated--voters want the sites close and they don't want to wait to vote.  Hence, our desire to increase to six sites.

If we had bigger sites, though, we could put more machines at the locations.  Metcalf South, our signature site, can hold about 25 machines.  We tried for a bigger store at the mall in 2012 but were unable to get it, and it's always iffy if we'll ever be able to return at the location, anyway.  Someday, the mall will be demolished.

It's a landmark location, so we'd love to have it forever.  The rent we've paid there is "nearly free," compared to the $25,000 we've had to pay in Shawnee.

Again, the Shawnee location is a good site, but it could be bigger and it also demonstrates that each site brings at least this much in rent expense.  That storefront has been vacant now for six years, so depending on your perspective, we're working on borrowed time there, too, or we shouldn't be worried at all for 2014.

(As we discuss locations, this is about the time someone at the county asks, "Have you ever thought about ......?"  Thank you--yes, whatever comes in place of the ellipses, yes, we have looked into that.)

Some of our advance voting election workers, at our office
just before we opened during the presidential election
cycle last year.  They were still zippy at the end.

We need several carts of paper ballots at each location, resulting not only in increased printing costs, but storage space at our warehouse.  In August, we have more than 1,500 unique ballots.

(Yes, thank you, we HAVE looked into ballot on demand printing, but it's not practical in these cases.  It might be, with about a $60,000 investment per site and we will have to try that if we move to six sites.  We don't have the physical space to bring in 30 more file cabinets into our warehouse).

We have learned that we need to retain the sites for the period from mid-July to mid-November. This reduces short-term moving of some items (like tables, chairs, and break supplies), but increases the cost of the facility. 

(Why, yes, imaginary question-asker, we have considered the county facility on ABC Boulevard....and every library in the county).

Our extended-period needs knock out any potential for a county facility but, actually, just the fact that we need the location for more than one day already dealt that blow.  Any facility being used is, well, to type the obvious, being used.

Finally, the big issue is that we need more staff members to pull it off.  During advance voting, most of our staff works 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday.  Two additional staff members would help keep them, literally, alive, and allow for some rotation of a light day where one or two employees work just 12-hour days.

There is thought that advance voting as percentage of total vote has peaked, between 40 and 50 percent of the total.  Perhaps, but as we face fewer options for election day, the drive for 6 sites is more vital.  Complaints of lines are never good, but they are much better if they are related to advance locations than election-day locations.

And right now, speaking of lines, neither type of facility is lining up to be amply available in 2014 and 2016.

Let Me Say This About That

Sister Shirley, my first and second grade teacher, introduced me to the Magic Math Machine.

I remember it vividly, up to the point of near-practicality.  It was something she drew on the overhead.  It was square, with ears.

Think of Mickey Mouse with a square head, and you have the image.  Instead of a nose, the Magic Math Machine/square Mickey Mouse had a rectangle in the middle of its face, where the magic answer would appear.

Because I was a geek even at six, I re-drew the Magic Math Machine for my older brother on my chalkboard in the basement.  I invited all my friends to have a go at the Magic Math Machine.

Each ear contained numbers that were to be added.  This is the point, though, that my memory gets fuzzy.

I can't actually remember where the magic came in.

In retrospect, I don't think there was any magic at all to how this thing worked.  I believe Sister Shirley wrote one number in one ear, another in the other ear, and then told us how we added them together to write the answer in the rectangle.

Then, we could erase the numbers in the ears and the rectangle, and start again!

No wonder my friends weren't impressed.

(I should point out that Sister Shirley was my favorite teacher of all time, but when I was in the third grade, she left her vocation to get married.  I went to her wedding and yet I still only remember her as Sister Shirley.  Thus, I'm also beginning to think there is further evidence of gaps in my memory from the 1970s).

Anyway, I've been on the hunt for the equivalent of an Elections Magic Math Machine.

What I'd like to know, in some easy way, is the relationship between advance voting and polling place turnout.  My imaginary Magic Math Machine has sliders that let me increase the number of advance voting sites or machines at a site, and see instantly how that impacts the number of voters at each location on election day.

I took a crack at all of this following the 2008 presidential election and plan to follow this post with some numbers and the beginning of how such a Magic Math Machine might work.

One of the things I determined is that advance voting clearly lets us "sweat the assets," getting utilization of our voting machines at a rate of about 85 percent (meaning, of the time we are open, a machine would be idle only 15 percent of the time).  At the polls, the utilization rate is about 25 percent.

A robust Magic Math Machine is one of the things I'd like to see as an answer to the now infamous, "We've got to fix that," comment regarding lines at polling places by President Obama.  If the Election Assistance Commission is amped up as a response to this statement, this is a tool I wish the EAC would develop.

There are some statistical modeling packages out there.  Crystal Ball, by Oracle, has some capabilities and I've tried to look at R (that's what it's called, R) as a hobby, but you can imagine that any statistical package that goes by a letter already insists upon itself.

(Oh, a side note on the "fix that," comment--there has been no shortage of ideas put out by the media, scientists, and election administrators on how "that" might be fixed.  There have so many ideas, in fact, that I'm growing concerned that fixing "that" likely won't happen, primarily because no one seems to be stopping and agreeing upon what "that" is.  The entire community is in solutions-mode without a problem statement).

"That" in Johnson County terms is "this":  What's the right mix of advance voting and voting at the polls?  Does that mix change by type of election (should we offer satellite advance voting for the lower turnout spring elections, for instance)?   What role, if any, should we have in our office to steer someone one way or another, voting in advance or at the polls?  If we think we should have a role, why?

I'm hung up on the fact that 50 percent of our 2008's vote came in advance and in 2012, 43 percent was in advance.  That 43 percent is still big, but in real numbers, it put more than 15,000 people at the polls that we thought would have voted in advance.

If we knew they were coming for dinner, we'd have put a place-setting at the table.

Actually, I've simplified that statement for effect.

In our case, we were prepared for that greater turnout because we always build the election with more machines that we need, but it was an exhausting day for our workers.  We encroached our buffer.

More importantly, 2012 highlighted the lack of control we have in preparing for turnout and no one--in this election--is talking about the other side, planning for a higher turnout than occurs.

There's a cost there.

One of our county commissioners, a former mayor, once wisely compared planning for elections as buying a summer's supply of snacks for the pool.  Terrific weather, and we'd be back needing more money for more snacks.  If the summer was cool and rainy, expect a lot of chips to be wasted.

The uncertainty, and the costs that come with uncertainty, are a big deal.  I don't know the specific issues nationwide, but lack of funding, or at least reasonably cautious spending, was probably a root cause behind "that."

So, nationally, whatever "that" is, I don't think it can be solved as simply as some pundits are making it.

The answers to "that," for me will come from the elusive Magic Math Machine.  More on that soon.

We've Got to Fix This

So much has happened in the past week that I have many topics I need to cover here.

One downside to blogging and actually working is that the work gets in the way.  It's been nutty, wall-to-wall, and until Google comes out with telepathy blogging, this old-fashioned method of catch-up will have to do.

Tuesday night, our staff was humming along uploading results to the point I thought I'd be home before the 10 o'clock news was over.  We use several voting machine stations to upload results to our server and sadly in our cross-checks, we determined that about 15 locations didn't upload.

Bummer.  That was about another 125 cards, taking an additional 20 minutes or so.  Still, we posted final results on our website at 10:15.

I then had to complete a reporting sheet to the Secretary of State's office for statewide roll-up of races and as I was faxing that, I heard that news outlets were calling the election.

Bummer, again.  I was hoping to be an Average Joe watching that at home, I thought, with an imaginary clench of the fist, "Oh, Cross Checks!"

Cross-checks are good, of course.  Hence, an imaginary clench of the fist.

So, I didn't watch election coverage when I went home.  I ate my first meal of the day, around 11:30, until I didn't have the strength to raise my fork, and went to sleep.

I missed the acceptance speech and the hub-ub-a-boo line that's got election administrators talking.

Regarding people still in line, President Obama said, "By the way, we have to fix that."

He wasn't talking about lines in Johnson County, but I wasn't happy with the lines we had.  In some locations, we had lines of about 45 minutes, particularly in the early morning.

We had lines in advance voting, too, but our advance voting turnout was lighter than in 2008.  Problem was, more people voted at the polls Tuesday than voted at the polls in 2008.

On Tuesday, more than 154,000 people voted at the polls, compared to about 142,000 in 2008.

Double problem was, we reduced polling locations in response to budget cuts, from 284 in 2008 to 221 this week.

So, nearly 10 percent more voters with 20 percent fewer polling places.  That's a bad combination.

This reduction was encouraged because of the greater acceptance of advance voting.  One county department head, in a budget meeting after the 2010 election, said she thought our voters "got too good of service," in terms of wait time at the polls. 

Really.

Early in my Sprint career, I was responsible for telecommunications relay service, which bridges persons who are deaf or hard of hearing with voice users.  An operator sits between the callers, typing what's spoken to one user and relaying what's typed to the other.

This was a call-center environment, so I'm very familiar with the issues of projecting and handling volumes of traffic.  It's akin to building a highway for thousands of cars but realizing that the entrance ramp can only let one car in at a time.

"Fix this," isn't a simple concept.  Addressing a traffic choke-point by creating more entry points (more polling places or advance locations) also implies we have some control over where voters go. 

Half of our voters voted in advance in 2008, but only 43 percent in 2012.  That's a trend that could reverse in 2016.  We heard anecdotes of voters waiting in advance lines in 2008, only to find friends had no wait at the polls.  I think Tuesday was a result of some 2008 advancers thinking they were chumps for waiting and, instead, felt the stress of waiting on election day.

Traffic and Lines During the Last Hours
of Advance Voting Monday

I talked with a reporter at The New Republic about this and have some views on what "Fix this," might mean.     Doug Chapin also had a great post about this.

The president may not even remember saying it at this point, but the election administrator community will make this topic number one, I'm sure, at the annual legislative meeting conducted by the Election Center in January.

Some of my thoughts to "fix this" were raised in The New Republic post.

A couple more "out there" solutions:

1.  Reduce Voting Options.  This is contradictory to conventional wisdom, but election administrators run three elections in Kansas--advance in person, advance by mail, and at the polls.  If Internet voting were ever allowed, we'd have four elections running.  We have the same staff size we had 20 years ago, with half of the voters we have now and before advance voting was an option.  One way to consider managing traffic is to manage the entrance ramps to highway.

2. Appoint Election Assistance Commission Commissioners.  No election administrator has been more in favor of closing the EAC than me.  Contrived through the Help America Vote Act, I think the mission of the EAC has been accomplished.  But, if  "fix this" is a mantra, this is an agency that exists and should be amped up, again.  Currently, the four commissioner seats (two Republican, two Democratic, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) are vacant.  It's a Dead Agency Walking right now.  Filling the EAC Commissioner posts and adopting a new strategic intent focused on solutions, not advice, would be a potential way to address the "Fix This" objective.

3. Speaking of solutions, how about e-solutions.  Specifically, I'm talking Internet voting, email voting, Bring Your Own Device voting, electronic pollbooks, online registration, and a myriad of ways to leverage technology.

Said more directly, Internet voting is coming.  There are a lot of scientists and other smart people who refute that Internet voting can happen, often citing very valid security concerns.

But here's the thing--it's not up to them.  The number one question I'm asked by voters is, "Why can't we vote on the Internet?"  One day, the people asking the question will come up with their own answer.

We like to think we're in control of our destiny, but often a big bang occurs that causes us to react.  Internet voting will be such a thing.

Social factors will lead to Internet voting.  A legislature will pass a law that Internet voting must be implemented.  A city will decide to conduct its own elections using Survey Monkey.  A natural disaster may occur during a critical voting period (oh, wait, that did happen).

Once society decides it's time for Internet voting, the scientists will no longer have a voice.

We will go from, "why not," to "how." 

Should you disagree, I give you as People's Exhibit A the buzz related to a simple "Fix This" comment by the President.

We already are all asking ourselves, "How?"