In the News

I was a newshound even as a kid so I enjoyed the Kansas City Star's Mini Page and actually liked CBS's "In the News" segments on Saturdays.

This is a post in that spirit.

First, this past week, this very blog was awarded an industry Best Practice by the Election Center. My hometown paper even picked up the press release.

As gratifying as that was, my bigger observation was that of the six Best Practice awards given by the Association in 2013, two were related to tablet computers. And, not just any tablet computers: they utilized iPads.

Our office had already received a "Bright Ideas" award this year from Harvard University for our use of iPads at the polls.

These are devices that have been around only for about 40 months and now are a major piece of our culture. A minor piece of my spirit was bitten off last year by our county manager's office for equipping our employees with iPads during the presidential election cycle, but I knew it was the right decision and now most of our staff (and many knowledge workers in government and business) can't imagine working without them.

As evidenced by the innovative awards and uses--as well as the increase of electronic poll book use--iPads, and tablets in general, are obviously now a visible cog in the innovation cycle in elections and government.

When looking at the future uses of iPads, that consideration abruptly leads to Android tablets, which collectively outnumber iPads. In fact, (and I saw this again and again when I was at Sprint) companies have a way of gravitating to their natural market position, and it's very likely the iPad will become, over time, the niche player in tablets in much the same way the Mac is still a niche player in computers.

The Wall Street Journal recently postulated what that might mean for Apple. iPads could be the Blackberry devices of this decade, virtually gone by 2020. It's an important consideration, especially as tablet devices worm their way into more parts of the election process.

That's a whole 'nother post later, but a factor that will come into play with our next-generation voting system analysis.

Also in the Wall Street Journal was a recent update on the United States Postal Service's money woes. Since 2005, the article points out, first-class mail has declined by approximately 30 percent.

By comparison, in 2005, we sent out 85,000 first-class mail-ballots and this year will be sending approximately 300,000.  That's about a 250 percent increase.  Our communities are business-development engines for the Post Office in a time when the postal service is compressing.

If there is ever a living example of "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," it's the postal service. In fact, I think the postal service is in a fiddle jam session with the newspaper industry.

Maybe Amazon's Jeff Bezos will try to buy the postal service. There is a huge piece of synergy there.

Point is, everyone seems to see only one path for the postal service--reduced service and some sort of government bailout.  It's interesting that no one sees a path where the postal service succeeds.  Even the postal service doesn't see that path, although in meetings often I hear them say that they think they are succeeding today.  (Charlie Sheen's "Winning" comes to mind).

What if there is another path?  What if the postal service is privatized?  One way to improve the postal model is to make it market-driven.  The postal service already is the last mile often for Amazon, even though the packages go out through UPS.  It's possible that a shift in focus, and better management, could change things dramatically.

Short of that, I'm continually amazed at how a business can be in such a tailspin and either seem oblivious or unwilling to actually correct the course. You'd think the postal service would have sales managers regularly calling on communities that regularly have mail-ballot elections, or an aggressive vertical marketing campaign directed at elections.

The postal service does spend money on advertising, but those marketing efforts are very unfocused and likely do not provide a good, um, return.

Lastly in the news this week is an article related to the new health care exchanges and voter registration.

This article, to me, is less important than the secondary issue that comes to mind.

We live in an age where various government entities touch us in a largely uncoordinated fashion. Yet, many of these--as stated in the article--are supposed to work together on our behalf. That doesn't work out well.

In Kansas, we're dealing with registration issues because we aren't receiving paperwork from the driver's license bureau, and data supports that this is something nearly every state sees except for Michigan, where the driver's license bureau and voter registration line up under one state officer.

I get the concerns in light of the recent NSA privacy concerns, but I think voters would benefit, for instance, with the Michigan model or even something more far-reaching.   For instance, if an identity card will be needed for a health care exchange, I think there is great value in considering one state officer in charge of "identity management."

Again, I know how creepy that phrase seems. But, imagine having one place to take care of your interactions with government, at least at a state level.

Often I hear of government conspiracies and I have to point out to the person raising the issue that, based on my nine years in government, my observation is that government isn't smart enough to pull off a conspiracy.

However, a big reason they believe conspiracy theories is the notion that there is one government, not separate city, school, state, county, and federal governments.

Further, citizens don't understand why they have to provide the same information to several agencies.  It's akin to being asking for your credit card number when you finally get to a live customer service agent at Visa, even though you entered it already once on your phone.

This has come up, in different ways, at a couple of meetings I've been to recently, and I think there are some creative ways to address this, even without reorganizing.  But they all require the "give a darn meter" to be raised with officials who are as incentivized to do so as the postal service leadership is to improve the postal service's financial performance.

Harkening back gain to my Sprint days, when the market landscape changed, three things would happen:  AT&T would change its price, MCI would change its marketing message, and Sprint would reorganize.

This almost ensured we would remain number three in the market, but the inward focus also addressed customer service issues.  A customer once said, "You guys treat customer service like an art."  That's how we felt, too.

(By way, he was talking about large business support, not what we would see later--and what I believe is being fixed--on the consumer wireline side).

I think states that organize around the citizen, with a single person accountable for records, would feel the payoff.  I know our office would.

That's a Bright Idea!

Our office received some validation last month with our use of iPads.

Specifically, Harvard University's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation has awarded our iPad solution at the polls (now branded the Election Worker Electronic Resource Guide) a 2013 "Bright Idea."

Our employees conceived of the innovative and cost-saving use of technology after we deployed iPads in our office last year.

We received word of the award last month but were asked not to announce it yet.  However, I saw today that the 13 winners were announced last week.

So, beans spilled :-)

The link below simply goes to the Harvard site and the list of national award winners.

I'll plan to follow up here with the entry info and description in the coming days.

http://www.ash.harvard.edu/Home/Programs/Innovations-in-Government/Awards/2013-Bright-Ideas

The brief summary on the site reads:

Johnson County has matched election worker needs with technology by using electronic aides in election day administration. This initiative evolved from training election workers online to the deployment of an Election Worker Electronic Resource Guide, which includes training presentations, opening and closing checklists, countywide precinct maps, a keyword-searchable soft copy version of the training manual, examples of photo IDs that are acceptable for voting, and a street index guide that is used to direct voters to their correct voting locations.

iPads at the Polls, an Update

You might remember that we deployed iPads at our polling places as an electronic election worker resource guide.

Among the many things we will be sorting out following last month's presidential election is the effectiveness of these and the potential further uses.

The eventual goal is to consider using the iPad, or some other tablet, as an electronic poll book, saving printing costs and time.  The practicality of such a thing is complex at best.

First, we would need at least two and maybe three at each polling place. They would need to constantly talk with each other so that if one malfunctions, is dropped, or lost, we would still have a way to continue signing people in and can capture voter history.

(Voter history, by the way, is simply a record of who voted.  Right now, we have to manually go through each of our 250+ poll books and, page by page, scan the barcode next to signatures after each election.  The iPads would allow us to upload the history automatically).

There were savings and efficiencies with the iPads during this election, primarily because we were able to avoid printing election worker manuals, large countywide maps, and street index listings. These maps and listings are tools to help the workers get voters to the correct polling place.

More than half of our supervising judges gave the iPads glowing reviews.  Others hated them.  In one polling place I visited in November, at 9 a.m., it hadn't yet been taken out of the bag.  (In fairness, this was an extremely busy site that might as well have had a revolving door at the front of the gymnasium based on the traffic I saw coming and going while I was there).

Just this past week, I received three calls from technology stakeholders, including Apple and two electronic poll book providers.  Another sent me his tablet prototype announcement a couple of weeks ago.

We also submitted the resource guide as an entry in Harvard Kennedy's School's Innovations in American Government Awards and made it past the first evaluation gate.  We're not sure if we're still in the mix there, and I hope to follow up on that with the leader of that program next week when I'm at elections conference in Washington.

The award has a financial piece to it, which would let us expand our iPad use as poll books.  How we would do that is still a question, although we have at least four viable partner opportunities, and we'd like to consider building our own software with the Secretary of State's office.

Managing and storing a fleet of iPads is no small thing.  They can be updated universally, but that assumes we have the networking capability for that and that's been a big assumption.  We already had to make room for additional voting machines and our warehouse is crammed as it is.

Then there's the matter of election worker engagement.  I don't think the iPad adoption that we've seen can be stereotypically linked to the age of a traditional election worker.  For some, it's their thing and for others, it's not.

Still, if we use them as electronic poll books, they must be used, and that brings into question how hard we want to push and train something that, in the end, is simply a place where the voter signs. The printing savings in indisputable, as is avoiding the after-election scanning, but the poll books add to training that already has become exhausting.

Add to this the uneven feedback by those who use electronic poll books and we're left with a lot to ponder.  This has been expeditionary learning thus far, creating more questions than answers.  Like every other equipment issue election administrators are facing, though, there probably isn't one right answer, and that's what we're beginning to see here.

Poverty, Pain, and Planning

You may remember that I suffered a broken ankle, with surgery needed.

I've been awaiting my time with THE ankle guy, and I'll be wheeled into surgery tomorrow morning.  Crutches for a couple of months--at least our election flurry is over.  I'm hoping this is the ultimate, "Measure twice, cut once," moment.

What this has done is set up three phases for the first half of my year.  The first phase is over: pre-surgery, April 11, where I focused on wrapping up everything with our spring elections.

In case you've been counting--we have--that was five elections in about seven weeks.  There has been plenty of activity to keep my mind off of my ankle pain.

I'll be working from home for a short period during phase 2, until I'm mobile enough to be allowed to drive, or at least crawl out of my house and climb into the car, telling myself I can drive.

During this phase, I have stockpiled a lot of planning topics and things I want to research for use in the rest of 2012 and 2013.  I'll be evaluating, for instance, vendors that do crowdsourcing, iPad apps for use in elections, and app development that we might be able to leverage going forward.

Meanwhile, the election office staff will be focused on cleanup of the Spring election, invoicing the jurisdictions, re-arranging the warehouse, and buttoning down advance voting sites and polling locations for the August and November elections.

I also have two trips in May that are really unavoidable.  One is our annual election training with the Secretary of State's office.  That training is always good but this year--and no offense to the residents because I'm sure the town is nice--the meeting is in Dodge City.

That's Dodge City as in, "the city that's almost as far away as Chicago but in the middle of nowhere when we have no time to waste."

You've heard the phrase, "Get out of Dodge," but have you ever heard anyone talk about getting into Dodge?

Of course not.  There's only one direct way there, and that's a long ride down the highway.

We've rented a bus, so I can stretch out with all my gimp toys and work during the drive both ways.

The second trip is to Auburn, Alabama, for my final class for the Election Center's Certified Elections/ Registration Administrator (CERA) distinction.  I want this completed before the presidential election, and graduation is in August.  I'll miss the ceremony, but by taking the class in May, I'll be among those recognized.

That will bring me to the third phase, hopefully the post-crutches phase and the phase that will coincide with us getting final word on redistricting.  We'll have a crazy couple of weeks preparing maps and moving voters to new boundary lines, working with a flurry of candidate changes, and finalizing our ballots for August.  Military ballots, for instance, will need to be mailed in mid-June.

Incidentally, this will be the first August election where military voters will be able to vote for precinct committee persons.  That may eliminate some of our coin tosses in ties where only a handful of voters cast ballots.

So, I have high hopes for my lamed-up period.  It will be my equivalent of the two weeks Bill Gates takes off each year to catch up on reading.  Except, mine is more laden in poverty and I'll be accompanied with some pain.

Hmmm, the three Ps of any election administrator:  Poverty, Pain, and Planning.  That's a normal day for us, actually. :-)

Regardless, it really will be good to hole up and plan the rest of the year.

Look for some remote posts in the next few days.

Too Much, Too Soon. Or, Not.

Maybe I still have the Oscars on my mind, or maybe it was the Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial, but this month has reminded me constantly of a line from Ferris Buehler's Day Off.

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.

So it has been as we get ready for this year's fourth election tomorrow.  It will be the second with the new state Photo ID law.

Thank goodness for Leap Year.  We'll need February 29 to recover from a very busy first two months.  About 40 percent of our county's voters will have had an election so far in 2012.   Our next election will be  April 3, but that's more than a month away.

That will give us time to organize our new envelopes, replace those that were damaged in shipping (it never ends), portion out our snazzy "Got Photo ID" balloons for the next set of polling places, test more of our voting machines, rewire the entire warehouse, and change every bit of our floor plan with new tables.

We'll also use that time to debrief election worker learnings from the ground related to Photo ID and the use of iPads to help steer voters to the correct polling place.  The iPads also have electronic searchable versions of our manual so workers can tap in, for instance, "Photo" and see the 10 places where we cover Photo ID.

I'm a big believer in knowing when to say, "Too much, too soon."   Sometimes, though, I don't have the sense to listen to Brian of two weeks ago.   Somewhere during the month, throwing the use of  iPads at our unsuspecting election workers didn't feel like, "Too much, too soon."  Some of the workers' looks during training Saturday suggested otherwise.

Still, this is the first step to the adoption of electronic poll books, where I hope we'll be within five years, and the paper and staff savings aren't insignificant.  The one-time savings isn't equal to the cost of the iPad, of course, and maybe not even over a two-year life of the iPad, but sending one street index guide to all of the polls instead of carving it up polling place-by-polling place is a big staff timesaver.

The iPads may last longer than two years, but it's worth pointing out that iPads didn't even exist two years ago.  (Really, stop and do a fact check if you must.  I bought one the day it came out in April 2010).

Eventually, the iPads give us a chance to revisit the use of wireless Internet at the polling places, if the facility has Internet, to check our www.jocopolo.com site and direct lost voters more quickly.  We kept wi-fi out of our polling places because of voting machine integrity activist concerns in 2006 but now most polling places have wi-fi for their own employees who work at the facility.

Times have changed and, in the meantime, voting machines still aren't susceptible to being modified by computers using wireless Internet.  (There isn't any kind of wireless modem installed in the voting machine).

Tomorrow's election will be slow enough that our workers will have time to learn the iPad, learn the street index guide and, maybe, read through the training presentations that we uploaded in addition to the manual.  We will have high-school student election workers in August and November--one at each polling place--so if we continue on this path the students will be a support resource for the iPads this fall.

The story line with the media tomorrow will continue to be Photo ID.  From our standpoint, while Photo ID implementation is something we're watching, the adoption and use of the iPads is the biggest area of learning.

Wet Signatures

Is there an election administrator term any more geeky than "wet signature?"

The term means an actual, physical signature, as in, "with ink."  Get it?  Ink is wet.

Most election jurisdictions, including Kansas and the Department of Defense (for military and overseas voters), require a wet signature on the voter registration form.  That's why voters can't go to our website, complete a registration online, hit "submit," and call it done.

Instead, they must print off the form and sign it, then mail, fax, or scan and email it.  Some drop it off in person, old school.

We were the first election office in Kansas to begin accepting faxed and scanned registrations after getting permission from the Secretary of State's office.  There is a drawback to accepting anything faxed; primarily, if the voter faxed the form upside down, the voter has a confirmation that the fax went through and we have a blank piece of paper with no idea how to contact the person who now thinks he or she is registered.

That will be an issue when voters begin faxing photo identification for advance voting or when citizenship verification goes into effect next year.  I expect we will get a lot of faxes that have black boxes where the photos were.

PDF Expert, an iPad Application
that makes wet signatures dry

So, in those cases, email is better.

We set this all up around the Dark Ages of technology, back around the 2008 presidential election, before iPads even existed (I was the first kid on the block to get one on the day they came out and believe it or not that was less than two years ago, April 2010).

Why does that matter?  Well, now there is an app and I'm sure many more coming that push the, um, email envelope.  The app, PDF expert, allows voters to complete a voter registration form, for instance, and sign it with their finger or a stylus.  Then, the voter can email that application to us.

So, is that a wet signature?  Probably, although if this catches on, election geeks will have to huddle for a new phrase.  Jargon is hard to come by in the election world, and many eyes will be wet if this phrase goes away.

We received our first registration that looks like it came through this way.  Here's the rub, though--signing your name with your index finger on a piece of glass looks a lot different than your signature with a pen on a piece of paper.  We check signatures on advance voting applications and on mail-ballots against the registration signature.  Likely, some of these signatures won't match the PDF Expert version.

Our recommendation to anyone using this new technology is to sign their name with a stylus, as well use as a steady hand holding the iPad.