Six Bites of the Election

This has been such a crazy week that I'm left to update in a way I've been trying to avoid: the hodgepodge collection.

Being a Diary, after all, I've tried for more frequent updates and when then things were happening rapidly this week, I realized I missed some opportunities for video.

I'm dialed in now, though, looking especially for some video to bring to life the preparations in these next two weeks.

First, this week:

1. We have final maps from redistricting.  We've reconciled those against our maps and are making a couple of minor changes, planning to post "official final" early next week.  We have about a gazillion maps to print for candidates and for our election, so we'll begin knocking them out.  Maps take quite a while to print, however.
2. And, speaking of printers, we have a lot at our office.  Trees R'nt Us.  Or, maybe they are because we consume so many.  With about 2,000 different ballot styles for this upcoming election, that's a lot of printing and proofing.  We're fortunate to have such dedicated employees proofing the draft ballots.  They worked as 12-hour day Friday on the heels of about 50 hours put in last week before Friday.  We're hoping to be in ballot-printing production mode before July 4.
3. All of our voting machines are tested manually before each election by a dedicated group of retirees and election workers.  They've done preliminary testing but will be testing them in depth in about 10 days and I'll plan to capture that on video.
4. Likewise, I'll plan some video and photos of our training, which starts in 2 weeks.  Training is exhausting.  I have no idea how Broadway actors can perform as they do because I'm achy and sore after leading a 3-hour training and I don't sing and dance.  I'm still hobbling a smidge following ankle surgery (but I'm beginning to run on my zippered ankle) and I swear I'm shorter since my surgery.  I'm hoping to be physically ready for training and at least the same height as I was in 2010 by then.
5. Speaking of that, I have such empathy for all candidates walking door-to-door in constant 100-degree heat.  I say it often--it's incredibly hard to be a candidate.  I think the winning candidates should push a measure, for their sake, to have all elections only in 70 degree temperatures.
6. Candidates should get their updated voter list orders starting Monday.  We're proofing all the changes, but we're done with the changes.

We have so much ahead of us.  This election especially, we're looking at the most immediate couple of steps.  We're taking a baseball approach to this mid-summer election classic, one day at a time.  We have the whole timeline mapped out, but this is an election that is better taken in bites.

I'll have some images to share with the bites that come after the 4th.

Steady as She Goes

In the aftermath of the redistricting pass by the Kansas legislature and the ensuing court decision, I think it's worth opining about how lucky Kansas has been with its Secretaries of State.

I've worked for three of them, initially appointed by Ron Thornburgh.  That vacancy came after the retirement of Connie Schmidt, Johnson County Election Commissioner from 1995 to 2004 and still a great leader in election administration as a consultant on a national level.

The Secretary of State can use whatever process he or she wants to fill vacancies, but Secretary Thornburgh treated an Election Commissioner vacancies as any job that was to be filled.

He created a screening committee and posted the job.  In my case, I was proud that I was selected from among 65 candidates at the time and, so you know there's no cronyism, I had never met Ron Thornburgh until the week of the final interviews.

Working as Election Commissioner is a different kind of job, almost like running a small business.  We have laws and statutes to govern our processes but Election Commissioners make all day-to-day decisions.  There are four Election Commissioners in Kansas, appointed by the Secretary of State.  These four are in Johnson, Shawnee, Wyandotte, and Sedgwick counties.  Elections in the other 101 Kansas counties are administered by the elected county clerk.

Elections is a logistics business and a scale business.  A $10 extension cord becomes $3,000 if it goes to all polling places, for instance.  Election administration varies across the country, but in my case we're left to do much on our own, and more than we'd like at times, from arranging cleaning and security services in our building to identifying and negotiating lease terms at advance voting locations.  When our fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, for instance, I'm the one who gets the call to meet the police and fire units at midnight.

As the empowered administrator of our office, I try very hard to never take the Secretary a problem.  In fact, I don't think I've ever escalated an issue for resolution, although I've often asked for advice.  I probably talk to someone at the Secretary of State's office three times a week, but discussions with the Secretary are generally strategic, long-term discussions, such as plans for voting systems when the day comes to replace our fleet.

In the Ron Thornburgh era, I saw how well-respected he was within the election industry.  He was extremely involved in the development of the Help America Vote Act, for instance.  He resigned in 2010 to go to the private sector and was replaced by the Governor with Chris Biggs.

I thought Secretary Biggs took office at a tough time.  He was running for Secretary of State (Ron had announced he wasn't running for reelection) and we were knee-deep in preparations for the gubernatorial election.

Much like Ron Thornburgh before him, he attempted to not be the news.  Most Kansans probably couldn't have named their Secretary of State, and that's not such a bad thing, in my opinion.

Chris Biggs had a short tenure, losing to Kris Kobach in the 2010 election, but has been remembered as a steady hand.  He retained the staff at the Secretary of State's office and that staff is nationally admired as well.

I submit that Kris Kobach deserves similar recognition to his predecessors, and the redistricting process we're undertaking underscores why.  The chaos that has come from the court reshuffling all the districts has provided moments of stress to candidates, incumbents, and potential candidates.  The Secretary of State's office has been snowed, to say the least, just like us as we're trying to compress at least four months of work into about four weeks.

But especially through the last few weeks, Secretary Kobach has been that steady hand that Kansans expect of their Secretary of State.  This week, I attended a local session on his outreach tour to explain changes created  by the Secure and Fair Elections Act, passed in 2011.

Life imitating Art--Secretary Kobach speaks
in person during an outreach session in Overland Park.

The Secretary spoke to a Powerpoint, showed Public Service Announcements, handed out highly professional materials from a website built for the law, and answered questions. This, while he and his staff  are busily scurrying to implement the most far-reaching redistricting changes in the history of the state. He answered questions about that process, too.

As election administrators in Kansas, we are required to attend annual training, by law, with the Secretary of State, and we've been impressed with his knowledge of our voter registration system.  He even has led some of the technical training.

He visited our polling places this spring and in two locations there was a large stretch of time without any voters.  During that quiet time, he stayed and spoke with each election worker, thanked them for working, and listened to them when they gave input about their experiences.

We likely will not have such quiet times at the polls in the short term.  This crunch-mode environment isn't a bubble where everything returns to some slower pace in a couple  of weeks.  I'm not sure there ever will be a slower pace, but we will be operating at an escalating intensity for about the next 11 months, though the wrap-up of the April 2013 election.

We have four countywide elections between now and then, including the presidential election, and little preparation time.

Election employees, as I've stated here before, excel at getting things done.  One reason is the ability to methodically break down projects into meaningful milestones and another is the mental approach to keep both hands on the steering wheel.

It's easier to do that when we know the Secretary of State has control of the bigger picture, and I've been fortunate to work in an environment where that's always been the case.  This year will go down as one of the zaniest, but as has been the case before, to the outside world we will look like our boring and steady selves, and that's a tribute to the election administration leadership we have in Topeka.

Redistricting Update

Breaking news just after midnight Friday that the federal court had released its redistricting order and maps is creating a four-day election frenzy.

The changes are massive, renumbering districts and putting two incumbents in one district, no candidates in another, and, overall, leading to a different kind of race.  Namely, candidates are racing to get filed or even withdrawn by noon on Monday.

We've already seen one candidate move on Friday so he could file in his new district.

In a clinical way, this is a fun time, almost starting from scratch and reinventing jurisdictions.

I know, though, that it has caused upheaval in so many lives that I doubt those impacted would call this fun.  I feel especially bad for those who woke up to see a friend and someone they respected ideologically suddenly also be an opponent in a primary.

In our office, we're now head-down putting the districts together.  We have 16 employees and while that may seem like a lot, each are specialized and spread pretty thin.  We have one mapping person and one person who has an end-to-end understanding of all our systems.

This is the screen projected by the mapping software
our team was using in a conference room Friday as they
made sure exact precincts were placed
in the proper Senate districts.

Those two locked up on Friday, are likely working as I type, and will be sorting all of this out for several more days.  They have to ensure that each precinct is placed in the proper district.  We have about 450 precincts and likely will have more because the maps split several precincts.

They finished four of the county's nine Senate districts on Friday.  They'll have the State Board of Education and House districts to do this week.

From there, we can begin placing voters in their correct jurisdictions and create ballots.  We need to mail military ballots within 2 weeks and we should meet that goal, but that's just the first milestone.

We'll need to create our ballot order to give our printer time to prepare and mail back about 150,000 ballots.  Permanent sick and disabled ballots, and ballots for those who already have requested an advance ballot, will be in the mail July 18.  We send a postcard to each voter, also, and that will go out the week before.

We're gathering a waiting list of map requests, and the maps take considerable time to print.  We should be in a position to print maps by the end of the month, but also have about a thousand we need to print for the August election--such as the "Vote Here if You Live Here" maps.

At some point, our mapping priority will have to be on the maps we need to administer the election.  If you're among those anticipating ordering some maps, I encourage you to call as soon as possible to get in line.

All that being said (or at least typed), we're nearing the other side of the work created by the census.

Redistricting: Where No News is No News

In the "It's Election Day, Somewhere," mode, I'm leaving a quick post during an unexpectedly non-hectic moment.

We haven't seen any white smoke coming from the courthouse to indicate that the three-judge panel considering new statewide districts have reached any resolution.

In fact, as I've been reading the electronic tea leaves (Twitter, mostly), it feels like nothing will be decided until next week at the earliest.  If that's the case, the Monday filing deadline will move a week back and our office's immediate focus will be the Secretary of State's Town Hall visit in Johnson County on June 14.  I'll be the overly attentive one in the front row, hoping to use that day as a chance to sync up and make sure we are like-minded in our election planning.

Particularly, we're continuing to watch the possibility of having two elections in August and the craziness that could be happening with a voter coming in to cast two separate advance ballots for two different elections at the same time.

Meanwhile, we're building the election in our systems, fully mindful that it may not all hold as revisions are made.  Typically, after the filing deadline, we'd be preparing our paper ballot order but that's a futile task at this point.

August of even years presents the most complicated ballot printing scenario.  We print enough paper ballots for advance by mail voters, anticipated provisional voters, and for persons who request paper ballots.  We expect about 75,000 voters in August and only a portion of those voters will cast paper ballots.

But with nearly 500 precincts and unique ballots for Democratic, Republican, and Unaffiliated voters, we'll have more than 1,000 ballot styles.  Then, we'll order 25 of one, 50 of another, 30 of a third, and so on.  It's a very complex process and to be prepared, we have to over-print and end up literally throwing away thousands of dollars worth of unused ballots after every election.

We're going to take a stab at printing paper ballots on demand at our advance voting sites, but we thought that was better as a 2014 initiative.  At this rate, though, we may be combining the 2012 and 2014 elections.

For now, our office is starting to feel like a Fire Station.  We're polishing and testing our equipment, washing the truck, laying out our uniforms, and waiting for the next alarm.

Hurry Up and Wait, Then Wait and Hurry Up

The election story of the year in Kansas is redistricting.

Of course, there are election stories regarding candidates and issues, but that's not the focus here.  There are candidate impacts from redistricting, though, and, in particular, potential candidates sitting on the sidelines trying to determine if this is the year they should run.

A principled candidate may want to run if he or she feels a void of those principles exist in leadership of a particular district.  But that same potential candidate may not want to run if there is another candidate already running who shares his or her values.

If candidates are on the sidelines at this late date for an August 7 election, voters will have little time to be captivated.  Military ballots need to be mailed in three weeks and advance voting starts about a month later.

The August election, usually with a turnout of about a third of the November presidential election, is looking like it will have a stark turnout.

Yesterday was the filing deadline for candidates except for those races impacted by redistricting, currently in the hands of a federal court.

We had our usual flurry of filings until the noon deadline and then a few precinct committee filers who thought the deadline was 5 p.m., only to have those filings rejected.

Our office had been madly proofing candidate names and pushing to get information updated on our website.  Usually at this point we would begin creating the election in our election management system, build the races, set the rotation (candidate names in many races have to be rotated by law so each candidate gets equal time at the top of the ballot), and create the ballots.

But this filing deadline was only Part A.  The second act is scheduled for June 11.  That's assuming the federal court is able to resolve the redistricting next week.

Drawing of boundary maps is not easy and although the court has plenty of people offering help in the forms of maps drawn, the court is trying to do something in two weeks that the legislature couldn't do in more than two months (really, five months, but I wanted to use "two" twice there).

Drawing the boundaries is complicated by the need to have comparable numbers of voters in each district (the deviation in the four U.S. congressional boundaries has to be incredibly low, less than 10 voters).  Even if there were no political factors at play, this is not an easy task.

There's still the potential of two elections in August, still the unresolved issue of whether or not the voter registration system can have the same voter in two elections at the same time, and the major issue that we don't have polling places or election workers secured for the second floating potential election day.

We have buttoned down advance voting sites for August and November and we could try to turn those sites into mega-polling places for August's second election day, if that happened.  It would be the vote center concept mentioned on the site before.

Such an idea may be pure genius or crazy talk (or both) but we plan to hash through the drivers and restrainers of such a focus early next week.  I will create a post related to that if it looks like maps won't be approved next week.

Redistricting, Unresolved

When it comes to predicting turnout, I'm especially good at nailing the number the day after the election.

Until then, of course, it's a guess.  I'm usually not that far off, though.

Since the day after the 2008 presidential election, I've been preparing for a drop in Johnson County turnout in 2012, from 78 percent to 75 percent.  I just think the 2008 election had an energy level that I didn't think would be repeated in 2012.

If I'm right, though, the story line in the newspapers will be that Photo ID suppressed turnout.  Not in effect in 2008, the new Photo ID law will be listed as the reason turnout dropped. 

Again, IF I'm right (and we all win if I'm wrong and the turnout is higher), I'll be pointing people back to this post.

Likewise, I point you now  to something I've said many places in the past 18 months: "For me photo ID isn’t even in the top 10 issues for 2012."

My post on Monday provides a sense of an item on my top 10 list.  We're up to about 75 machines that have power supplies "certified fried," by the way.  We're still evaluating.

Another worry came with the census and this one may impact turnout negatively and drop my 75 percent prediction.

We have no idea what state races we will have in the August primary.  By, "no idea," I mean, we don't know the legislative districts involved, the boundaries, or the candidates. 

We don't completely know the election date, even.  We thought the August 7 date could be moved by legislative action, but that idea seems to have died. 

That puts us a little more than a month away from the last date we can send ballots to military and overseas voters, and we got nothin'.

The filing deadline of June 1 has moved to June 11 for some races because the legislature has not approved plans for redistricting.  The new drawings aren't supposed to do this, but rumor has it they will split some precincts, which means some precinct committee candidates who file by June 1 likely will find out they aren't running after all because their precinct changed after the June 1 filing deadline.

New candidates have an uphill battle, I think, running against incumbents, so some people are likely sitting on the sidelines waiting to file but wanting assurance they aren't running against a Juggernaut.  Many will have a tiny window, or a knothole, to make the decision and get filed.

The issue seems destined to be settled by the courts, maybe by the end of May, maybe by June 4, or maybe later.  With many potential candidates hanging loose, there probably will be some uncontested races, and that's the ultimate turnout-killer.

Of course, voters will come out to vote for president, but there are some voters who only come to vote for their neighbor or friend in a local race. 

So, we're still riding the storm. 

I absolutely, absolutely hate the overused "Perfect Storm" phrase.   As Americans, it seems we encounter a Perfect Storm somewhere every day. 

Besides, it seems a compliment to call what we're going through a Perfect Storm.  There's plenty of imperfection at play. 

But, it's a storm, and rapidly becoming a Twister.

Throw Elections From the Train

If our elections were a 1920s silent movie, our April 3rd election would represent the valiant moment where we narrowly untied the beautiful girl from the railroad tracks and saved her from an oncoming train.

That was, remember, our fifth election of the year.

So, whew, the girl is saved!  Yay, us!

Oh, there's an election in four months, August 7, but that's not for, well, four months from now.

That's more than a season.  The Royals could lose 100 games in that span.  Four months is a long time.

Then, instead of five elections in nine weeks, we'll have had six elections in 25 weeks.  That's a lot, but much less dramatic-sounding.

What's to worry?

This movie is starting to sound like a love story.

But this isn't a 1920s silent movie.  August is coming at us like a Hitchcock or Spielberg thriller.

As background, note that Kansas is the only state that hasn't resolved its redistricting following the census.

I just learned that yesterday.

I've made a point of not paying attention to the redistricting effort, but I feel like I've Rip-Van-Winkled it at this point.  The only state:  well, we gotta stand for something.

Last week, a bill was introduced to move the August 7 primary election to August 28 if the redistricting isn't complete soon.

That would be bad from an election administration standpoint.  We have polling places lined up for August 7, election workers committed, training sites reserved, and training scheduled.

Then, yesterday, as he said he would do nearly a year ago when he met with election commissioners and county clerks, the Secretary of State faced a date with a big "X" on his calendar indicating it was time for him to have the press conference he hoped he wouldn't have.

The purpose of the conference was to stress that the August 28 date may not be consistent with the Kansas constitution and that having the election on August 7 would be the way to go.

I remember the Secretary saying last May 5 that if we got into the third week of April without redistricting approved, he would do all he could as Secretary of State to move the process.

So, there we were:  an August 7 election or an August 28 election.  Preference given, by legal minds, to August 7.

But wait--curveball:  if August 28 isn't constitutional and August 7 isn't possible, a new option was introduced by the media as "no election."  I'm not sure how that would fly, but from everything I've read, it seems like a possibility.

So, now:  August 7, August 28, or not at all.

But wait, round 2--Johnson County government has a unique charter that requires its primaries to be conducted the first Tuesday in August.  We already have a commissioner race that requires a primary.

The new list of choices, then:  August 7 and/or August 28, or August 7 for the county but no state races.

Really?

We just saved the girl, hopped onto the next set of tracks, shared an embrace, and turned around to see this charging at us?

In pure homage to silent movies, I'm pretending I can't hear all the concerns rattling around in my mind.  In thriller mode, I'm just assuming it will all work out.

Next week, clerks and election commissioners meet in Dodge City and this will likely be topic number one.

Dodge City is rarely the theme for thrillers.  Western movies end with the good guys heading happily into the sunset.

Here's hoping for a change in genre, as well as the obvious hope to be validated--that election administrators are, indeed, the good guys.

Sticker Shock, Literally

Johnson County's budget squeezer is taking a pause from the expense side and looking at revenue.

The county has hired a consultant to compare costs versus fees.  In the elections world, the major area that will be examined will be what we charge cities for elections.

I've mentioned before that the cities pay incremental costs when the election is less than countywide.  The laws are pretty specific about what can't be charged, but the areas that can be charged are more general in nature.

"Supplies," for instance--no question, we don't capture the full cost of polling place supplies, for instance.  We just don't have the resources to track all the costs and charge them back in a scientific way.

Take the "I Voted" sticker.  We buy a case of stickers once every couple of years.  A role is in each suitcase.  We know how many persons vote in an election and, theoretically, they each got a sticker (in person, at least), so we could do some cypherin' and recover the two cents per voter from the cities for stickers.

I'm sure the consultant will find more than unrecovered sticker costs.  I met with him today and expect that down the road we'll have some productive discussions where I give my view if I think he's struck gold or if he's drawing a conclusion that's probably outside the margins.

Then, he'll take his findings to the Board of County Commissioners, who will have to determine how much of the new costing model equates to a new pricing model.

It's a pretty good bet that the costs to jurisdictions for special elections will go up.  Probably the other area in line for its own version of sticker shock are maps that we produce as part of the Kansas Open Records Act.

We provide them electronically for free (or for $10 if we put them on a flash drive--to recover the cost of the flash drive).  We also charge $10 for printing the map, though, and I'm sure that barely covers the cost of toner.

Higher fees won't benefit our office.  They don't come back to the office to offset budget cuts.  They basically will go for the good of the order at the county level.

To a large degree, this whole process is good because essentially it's a third-party establishing fees.   It still will be an issue, though, particularly for candidates who get maps.  My advice to them is to buy a bevy of maps once redistricting is completed this summer.

Oh, redistricting--another topic for a future post.  The nuts and bolts of redistricting aren't an issue for us, but the timing will impact candidate filing deadlines and put a crunch into the August election.  More on that later.