Are You Receiving Me?

The election administrator grapevine is literally all a'Twitter with the news of the President's Voting Commission members being announced.

(Okay, sidebar for humor, but the initial order said there would be no more than nine members and now there are 10?  Helloooo, colleagues, we count things for a living!  I feel like the amplifier just went "to 11" and no one noticed.)

Anyway, one member's name that caught my eye was Brian Britton from Walt Disney World.

I took note for a few reasons:

• He has a great first name, spelled properly, with an I. (In fairness, in my college video game days, when I reached a high-score and was asked for my initials, I always typed "BRY").
• Former Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning once talked of learnings from crowd flow that could be obtained by watching best practices at Disneyworld.  He mentioned this during a panel at a PEW Conference in December 2008.  That night, a dinner speaker railed on the idea, offended that Disneyworld and voting were said in the same sentence.
• I've always thought Kurt was right, validated, I believe, by today's announcement.

I posted last week that I led a panel on "The Future of Elections," at our annual Kansas clerks meeting and as I prepared for that, I was reminded of TED Talks.  No one would have confused my speech with a TED Talk, but I was going for that flavor a bit when talking about the future.

I'm an idea guy, after all, and I think coming up with ideas is the easy work.  Implementing is the hard job (and something elections people do very well).  So, I was trying to provoke thought without actually solving any problems.

I'm good at that.

My plan was to play the role of "Teddy K" in In Good Company:

"You ask some excellent questions.  Excellent, excellent questions.  I'm glad you asked them.  And, I'm leaving it to you, to all of you, to answer them."

Anyway, I got to wondering what "TED" stood for, so I checked in with Dr. McGoogle, and learned it stood for "Technology.  Entertainment.  Design."

So, I kicked off my speech with that definition and said, "If you really think about it, that's the business we're in:  Technology, entertainment, and design."

I thought that was pretty profound.  I could tell by the expressions of the audience that no one else did, though.

"Okay, maybe you could replace "Entertainment" with the word "Elections," I said.

Heads nodded.

But, fact is, we live in a world where learning is more effective if it's fun.  Experiences are more meaningful if they are fun.  Typing this blog is, well, more fun when it's fun (he typed, circling back to the 9 vs. 10 member comment).

I'm not saying elections should be wacky Southwest Airlines fun (but, then again.....).  I'm just saying you can't discuss the voter experience without considering the actual experience.

It seems that's what this Commission is all about.  Standing in line to vote is about the experience of voting, just as much as the effectiveness of postal mail or options for persons who have disabilities.

Voting doesn't have to be fun to effective.  Voting doesn't have to be entertainment.

But there's nothing wrong with taking that attitude to the job.  Approaching voting as a voter is the first step to making voting better.

One of my biggest messages, often, is related to communications:  it's meant to be received.  Too often, we think about giving communications, rather than how it is received.

"Receiving" is the starting point of entertainment.  Receiving is the starting point of engagement.

Something tells me that this Commission, with the make-up of the members, gets that.

Playoffs? Don't Talk To Me About Playoffs!

When George Brett heaved a wild throw in the first game of the 1976 American League Championship series, I first heard a phrase, often repeated, that has stuck with me.

"Everything is magnified in the playoffs," the announcer said.

Make no mistake, presidential elections are administrators' playoffs.

Playoffs in sports are the time the success paradigm changes.  Instead of, "we can win if have this, this, and this," it becomes, "we would have won if only this."

Likewise, I often say that presidential elections expose the stress points in election administration.  We prepare with contingency plans, but there's always a, "I think this would have gone better if we did this" discussion.

Good election administrators were the kids in school who got a 99 on a test and immediately obsessed with the one mistake.

Our stress points in 2008, for instance, were facility-related, leading us to taking steps to address major facility issues.

In one case, we saw our little mail slot at our door couldn't handle the onslaught of ballots being dropped off.  The envelopes fell into a foyer and could have been soiled if the floor was wet.  So, we've since converted a window into a drop box a bank would be proud of, dropping the envelopes into a secure, locked room.

This election exposed some process issues--nothing serious, but when scaled became unnecessary time-eaters, from some changes we need to make to our website to poll agent forms to training.  There's never enough time to improve our training the way we want or to conduct the training the way we'd like, but we have some changes we will be making in this cycle.

"In this cycle" is an important phrase because this election isn't quite finished and we're already gearing up for the next.  We have an April countywide election and a primary for that election in February.

In fact, we have less time to prepare for the February election, after November, than we did to prepare for November after August.  The crunch mode continues through April.

All of us are asked frequently right now about how things must be slowing down and it's totally the opposite.  We have payroll to complete, voter history to finalize, election worker training ahead, and polling places to secure for the spring, for instance.  April's election brings new issues because election day is the Tuesday after Easter.  Some polling places won't be available, so we'll have to move voters, and our training will be impacted because we typically conduct supervising judge training the Saturday and Sunday before the election.

Spring elections are the most complicated, also, because of candidate rotation schedules.  Add to all of this the holidays, filing deadline in January, a new legislative session, and the fact that none of us have had a day off in months, or even have laundry caught up, and it is anything but slow.

Our staff will conduct a post-mortem of the election in early December to document all of the areas we want to address short-term or highlight as part of our strategic approach in 2013 and beyond.  We'll prepare a presentation in the spring related to all of those issues and I'll post it here.  This was the summary after 2008 (with a nod to Tammy Patrick of Maricopa County for a couple of stock photos):

Bocc Committee Of The Whole March 26, 2009 from briandnewby

One obvious area that must be addressed is our budget, particularly in staffing.  We are seriously understaffed, have been pointing this out for a few years now, and we're near a breaking point.  I'll have a post on that in a few days.

Another post soon will be related to the hot issue of the day--lines at polling places.  I've got some interesting math on what occurred to us in 2012, but, short story, we expected an average of about 140 more voters at each polling place, compared to 2008, because of our reductions.  We had 215.

The argument to reduce polling places was that advance voting has been so successful, yet even though  overall turnout was 7 points lower in 2012 compared to 2008, we had the most persons ever vote at the polls in Johnson County history.  This, after reducing polling places.

One thing to consider, that I'll get into with that post, is that all of this goes beyond simple capacity planning.

For now, this post is long enough--more soon.