Boring Is What We're After

A significant paradox of this site comes as we near a busy election time.

This blog was created to provide you, dear reader, with some of the geeky and boring aspects of administering elections.

The more boring the better, I say! (To which, you likely would say, "no kidding.")

There is comfort in boring.  Boring is the opposite of not boring, or any other word or phrase you can identify that effectively means crazy, haywire, or nutty.

Boring's true nemesis is darkness.  That's the point of the blog, to be transparent, so when a week goes by without a post, I have itchy typing fingers.

Darkness here, though, always means we're swamped--not bad swamped, just swamped.

Then, in the rush to create a meaningful post, so many things are happening it's hard to hit them all.

Geese were lining up outside this week while we
were getting our ducks in a row inside.

So, here's what's happening right now--we are setting up the election, and that means trial and error in many ways and a lot of reading and proofing.

We have an election management system that was built in the mid-1990s.  We call it ESM, which I never understood, other than that as a county government, we already have an EMS.

Anyway, this system is where we set up our election--candidates, races, jurisdictions, supplies, election workers, and polling places, for starters.

This isn't Microsoft Project with many tabs.  In fact, we use an extract of the election to feed into our tabulation system to set up the ballots and candidate rotation on the ballots.

We have about 1,500 different ballot types for this election and hundreds of races.  This setup takes days to manually enter.

I've pasted at the bottom of this post some examples of the output we get from this system.  The samples here are about 10 pages from 50 pages of reports that, literally, took four hours to print.

I wanted the forms as examples when we went into our county's capital budget process to again ask for funding to replace this 20-year-old system that isn't supported and, if it crashed today, we'd have no sure way of rebuilding.  In Johnson County, not investing in elections for years and years will eventually come to roost, and we stress each election as we set this up.

There was a hot minute where the statewide voter registration system, known as ELVIS after a semi-forced acronym to make it sound cool, was going to be an evolution of our ESM.  At the time, it was provided by Accenture and the state of Kansas selected Accenture for ELVIS.

My second day on the Election Commissioner job, I was greeted with the news that things were back to the drawing board for the statewide voter registration system.  I don't know what occurred, other than that the state and Accenture came to an "understanding."

But, this meant, in order to have a system up and going and in compliance with the Help America Vote Act, this new procurement had great urgency.  As such, when implemented, some of the initially envisioned features (those in our ESM) were not part of the project.  Some have come since, but this is why we run with two systems--ELVIS and our, um, ELVIS impersonator.

Our Deputy Election Commissioner and a very weary employee have been proofing printouts from an equally weary employee who set up the election and comparing that output with two other employees--rapidly approach weary--in the tabulation room.

From there, we create an audio ballot for each of the 1,500 we have (for those who are blind and cast a ballot on their own) and we will have a group of part-time employees listen to each of the ballot to proof the accuracy.

We have to get this proofing done so we can send our ballot order for the paper ballots to be printed.  We can print military and overseas ballots at our office to get them out on time, but the big load of ballots are printed out of state.

Machines in a row here, no ducks.

We're also gearing up to try printing all advance-by-mail ballots at our office.  That will be about 10,000 ballots and require that we purchase a solution we've been eyeballing for quite a while and many others--particularly those in Florida--have utilized successfully.  The benefit is that we print only the ballots we use (rather than large overages as we estimate demand) and the net cost, because we don't pay for unused ballots we destroy, should be less.

Meanwhile, another group of part-timers have invaded the warehouse, beginning manual diagnostics on each voting machine.  The typical  automated machine diagnostics are comparable to what your computer goes through when it boots up.  We don't think that's good enough.

Doing the diagnostics manually, instead, is laborious, but it ensures that nothing nefarious has sneaked into our machines.  It's a best practice created by Johnson County and emulated nationwide, in fact.

There you go--boring.  Boring, Busy, Ballot work--the Three B's.

We're entering that "no time for laundry" period, in fact, and soon will be ready for Bleach, Borax, and Brightener, and not just for our clothes.

What the Definition of That Is

This week, some of the country’s brightest minds will converge in a large city to consider how a new wave of technology can help them  inspire their target market of voting-age citizens.

They aren’t going to the Consumer Elections Show in Las Vegas, but they might as well be.  They will be discussing many of the same gadgets, tools, and marketing methods featured at the Show.

Instead, election officials and academics will be meeting in Washington, D.C., for an Election Assistance Commission roundtable webcast that debriefs the presidential election.  This is an advance of the annual Election Center legislative conference that begins tomorrow. 

This will be the first time many of us have seen each other in person since the infamous long-line comment stated by president Barack Obama in his November acceptance speech that, “We’ve got to fix that.” 

“That” refers to several-hour lines  in a couple of states last November.  I suspect the president has forgotten he said, um,  that.  But some legislators haven’t, already drafting bills that are more goodwill gestures than practical measures. 

Defining “that” will be as elusive as defining, “is,” used by a different president 15 years ago.

But election administrators understand the workings of the sausage that comprises, “that,” and election sage Merle King eloquently explained this during the ES&S National Advisory Board meeting yesterday in Florida. 

He’s now in D.C. today, hosting the roundtable.  I’m typing this en route, preparing to join the participants and other election officials at the legislative conference.

Yesterday, Merle explained that root causes of “that” come from components of the overall voting system, of which voting machines are only one piece.

The other pieces come from such elements as pollbooks, electronic pollbooks, ballots and ballot-on-demand devices, voter lookup features, polling place locators and mapping applications for smartphones and computers.

One of Merle’s points is that “that” rarely included voting machines, which performed well.  “That” is a fallout of how election administrators utilize these other components.

Orchestrated well, mimicking a systems administrator, and things go smoothly.  Bumps in the components, such as a slow pollbook worker or problems with an electronic pollbook, and lines happen--I mean, "that" happens.

Election administrators must be IT managers, he said. 

I go further—we have to be IT visionaries.  We have to braille the culture to know as much about everything as we can, drawing linkages to elections from seemingly unrelated companies and applications.  That's a pretty massive undertaking but one our voters (consumers) do naturally.

We must understand the personal devices and applications our voters are using.  We must understand that smartphones drive behavior and are an opportunity for innovation in voting and outreach.

We need to understand  tablet devices and begin looking at data related to tablet use differently than data related to smartphone use.  We have to know which devices are emerging, the applications that users are downloading in their daily lives, and how that user expectation carries into voting. 

For instance, users more and more often are signing for credit card purchases and online activities with their fingers on tablets and smartphones.  They will expect to be able to register to vote or apply for an advance ballot in this manner.

Fat-fingered Freddy’s signature isn’t going to match his penmanship.  Women with long fingernails will experience frustration navigating tablets, but this gives us a chance to associate these experiences to touch-screen voting machines as a more relatable way to explain the answer to "I pressed this candidate and this one came up," experience.

And, speaking of the Consumer Electronics Show, Ford and General Motors announced in Las Vegas plans to encourage developers to create applications for their vehicles.  What does that mean for elections? 

Voters who drive but are disabled, for instance, might soon have a way to send a beacon to a tablet inside the polling place so a worker can know to come out and offer curbside voting.  Or, the voting location services, designed for smartphones, might shift to voice-based, with info popping up on the user’s radio screen.

These things have nothing to do with voting as we know it.  But, the thing is, everyone is a voting expert.  That's not a facetious comment.  It's true.

Most people regularly vote at least in the largest elections and if that’s the only time they vote, they bring in two or four years of pent-up consumer experiences that they compare with something they understand—voting.

It doesn’t take long for these voters to think about how gizmos, electronics, applications, social networking, tablets, and smartphones would have fixed “that.”  As IT leaders/election administrators, we have to be ahead of that expectation.

I remember just a few years ago arguing, literally, with our county's IT department that our website had to function with the Sarari browser.  I was convinced the iPhone, just introduced, was going to be a data game-changer.

Their response was that Safari wasn't a player in the browser wars.  It wasn't, but rather than proactively meet needs, they wanted to wait until usage inched from five percent to 10 percent.

I won that fight, eventually, but suffered in the "team player" category.

The changes ahead, though, make that futuristic IT insight elementary. 

That’s Merle’s point, and it is bound to be a topic for the next couple of days.  The IT mindset is one that I’ve been committed to since the day I arrived eight years ago this week. 

This much I know:  “That” will be fixed with “IT.”  

Here’s Merle's presentation:

Vendor Meetings

It's a long and winding road that explains how the voting system our county purchased in 2002 from Global Election Management Systems makes us an ES&S customer, but that's the case.

Along the way, Global was purchased by Diebold.  When I came to the county in 2005, I was struck with the sophistication level of the election vendors compared to those I was used to during my 20-year career at Sprint.  I was used to Lucent and Nortel, and Diebold at the time was more like a couple of consultants working from their homes.

For a couple of years at Sprint, I managed something we called our Executive Forum, a collection of Chief Executive Officers from our largest wholesale customers.  The average billing on these accounts was more than $2 million/month. 

We'd pull them in a couple of times a year, play golf, tell them the latest things we had going on, listen to them, listen to them some more, and usually play golf again.  It was Relationship Marketing 101, and it was a very effective marketing tool.  Our customers, while competitors, learned from each other as well.

I asked Diebold, when I came, why they didn't do something like that (not to be "wooed," and to the contrary "something like that," to me, really meant having some regular meetings with their largest customers).  I was looking for the meeting without the golf (we're government, after all).  After a couple of years, Diebold created such a group and called it the Customer Advisory Forum.  Given that I was the pest to create such a thing, I became a member of this Forum.  It was a great way to make sure our operational issues got visibility to Diebold's senior executives.

Concurrently, Diebold competitor ES&S was doing the same thing.  When ES&S acquired Diebold's election business in 2009, ES&S merged these two customer advisory groups.

I'm coming back from one of these meetings right now.  My posting earlier on envelope pricing was timely because I think we're going to be able to identify a cost-cutting solution there.  As with what seems like every post so far, more on that later (it's going to be a long year).

ES&S's senior management team looks and acts a lot like the vendors I saw at Sprint.  The industry is more sophisticated now, but a lot of that is just the level of people ES&S has hired.  More on that later, too.