Back to the Present

Coming back from the future of election discussions with vendors and colleagues, we're facing the reality that the present state of elections could be a lot better.

Filing deadline for the spring elections is Tuesday at noon, and right now we have a relatively small primary--two wards in one city, with about 50,000 voters.

It's a good thing because we're going through uncertainty with the printing of our paper ballots.   Our printer has had some personnel changes and we need to see if performance has been impacted in advance of our countywide April election.

Printing of ballots is complex.  When I came in 2005, we had a dispute with a local printer from the 2004 presidential election.  The ballot printing was awful and the ballots often wouldn't scan.  Candidate names sometimes were in the center of ballots.

This dispute rankled the owner of the company and he told me that he wouldn't print our April ballots unless we paid this disputed invoice.  We later settled, in our favor, and he never printed ballots for us again.  We couldn't do business with someone who held us hostage like that.

So, we set out to find a new printer and had, for instance, a great conversation with Henry Wurst, the largest printer in the Kansas City area.  They printed some ballots for us in a test election but had to come back and say they couldn't support us--ballot printing is too complex.  Timing marks have to be perfect for scanning, there are literally hundreds of different ballot styles because of candidate rotation, we need some folded for mailing, and, oh, by the way, we usually need them within a week of ordering.

Many communities are looking at or using ballot-on-demand printers, and that may work at advance locations, but it wouldn't be practical for us at polling places.  Only a small portion of ballots are cast on paper at those locations.

The bigger issue related to paper continues to be the post office.  Postage is our largest office expense and the service where we have the least satisfaction.  At the Election Center meeting last week, I listened to the same presentation from the Post Office that I have heard for nearly a decade, how the office is working with election officials to make sure everything runs smoothly. 

The person presenting had been given photos of our ballots from last spring, so I hopped up to the open mic and stressed the disconnect between his view and our view on the ground.  Apparently, there is a special online reporting form where I can go to document this and all will be fixed.  We'll do this and check in with him next January, but I'm not optimistic.

Postage rates are going up and there will be more changes to post offices and deliveries.  This is all bad news in the voting-by-mail world, which more and more becomes an unrealistic option to voting at the polls.

Voting at the polls is under siege, of course, because of school safety concerns.  Churches are less available to us right now because of Easter and we get plenty of complaints from using churches.

In April 2005, with a marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot, the number one voter complaint was the use of churches as polling places.  In a special election in September 2005, regarding a sales tax that funded schools, our number one voter complaint was the use of schools as polling places.  If the "sugar tax," or a "calorie tax," ever makes it to a ballot, expect our use of Denny's to be an issue.

And Internet voting?  No way.  Never.  That's what we're told, anyway.

Detractors point to the problems with the Oscar nominations, selected through Internet voting.  Dig deeper into that and you'll find the problems were log-in questions and unfamiliarity with the Internet, not security issues.

We're left with the conventional wisdom that there's no possible way that Internet voting can be as reliable as current methods.

Really?  What's the reliability gauge?  We're running out of ways to vote here. We need the future of voting to be defined because the current state of voting is evaporating.

I still say, to the "No way, never," crowd on Internet voting, this will be forced on us eventually.  I truly believe that.  It's human nature to think we're in control of our own destiny, but we often aren't.

As department directors at Sprint we used to tell our employees that we were in a new era, the end of lifetime employment, and that they need to take control of their own careers.  We would encourage them to ponder their own career path and ask them how they would go from their current position to position A, B, or C. 

Then, we'd reorganize and tell them that they had a new role.  Or, they'd be laid off.  So much for them taking control of their destiny.

One day, a state legislature will pass a law that mandates Internet voting by a specific day.  Or, a city will somehow charter out of conventional elections to use Internet voting, requiring some sort of shift by a county election office.  Or, an equivalent of a coporate reorganization will occur, and there we'll be.

That's the future of elections--a winding road splintered from the present.

Back From Election Camp

I'm facing a re-entry back at the office tomorrow after being out of town for a full week in election-related meetings.

I blogged about the first meeting, the ES&S National Advisory Board.  The second half of the trip was primary a review of election-related legislation.

Real work awaits as we are only 8 days away from filing deadline for the spring elections.  That Tuesday, Jan. 22, also will be the first day everyone is back in our office at the same time since Dec. 6.

That's the result of the holidays, some travel, and many staff members catching up on personal things that were put on hold for most of 2012--everything from surgeries to car repairs to parent/teacher conferences, and everything in between.

I also expect tomorrow's staff meeting, when most of us will gather, will be the first chance we've had since January 1 to talk through learnings of the new legal requirements that went into effect this year involving citizenship.  New registrants must provide proof of citizenship and, in fact, we have to make a copy of this proof and attach it to the voter's record.

That will have downstream impacts regarding scanners and scanning time, as well as copying.  We have to preserve the confidentiality of these citizenship documents, so the copier we use will not have any kind of hard drive that records copies.  We also have a dream of creating a self-serve computer kiosk that will allow registrants to upload the information directly at our office, but we don't yet have that developed.

For now, I'm starving for routine, which elections are very good at providing.  As mundane as that previous paragraph may have been to read, it was nearly joyous to type.

I did have one major learning from last week's meetings that I'll share in a post early next week.  For now, if you can't get enough election geekdom, you might want to begin also checking out a new blog by Scott Konopasek.

I don't know that I've ever met a nicer or smarter man than Scott, and I think he will do great things to advance the thought leadership of this profession.

Back in touch after enjoying the incredibly boring drive to my office tomorrow, which I will greet as though I'm sailing along a double rainbow.

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:

Let's Talk Business

Eighteen months ago, I participated in an Election Assistance Commission roundtable webcast related to social media.

All of the panel participants, and many of the viewers and followers, knew that social media was  emerging as a tool for election administrators.  It was in its infancy in the 2008 presidential election and 2012 was expected to be big, really big.

Twitter, for instance, launched in 2006 and was just finding its way in 2008.  Speaking of Twitter, you may have heard that the close of the 2012 election resulted in the message that was retweeted the most IN HISTORY.

I learned this during the PEW Voting in America Conference earlier this month.  I was thrilled to see Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter take the stage, but I was less enthused about the collective message.  Frankly, I'm not sure there was a message.

PEW's David Becker kicks off a much-anticipated
panel discussion related to social media and
election administration.  Representatives (l-r) were
from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter.
Doug Chapin of the Humphrey School of
Public Administration moderated.

Stick with me--this is tough love, raising the bar, expecting more, that kind of thing.  To the point I raised during the roundtable webcast, it's time to take social media in election administration from a hobby to something more useful, with a grander vision.

And, for that, we need the social media companies to be leaders.

Four years ago, such a moment on stage would have been palpitating, for me at least.  "Oh my gosh, on my gosh, can you believe Facebook sent someone to meet with us!"

But now, I've changed.

It's not them, it's me.  They were enthusiastic and very pleasant.

I'm jaundiced, I guess, but talking about a presidential tweet outpacing Justin Bieber as the most retweeted message over any in the last six years is a yawner.  I also read recently that the finale of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," was the most talked about Bravo Housewife episode IN HISTORY as well, but history doesn't mean much when the beginning of time is a year that begins with a "20."

We have a common interest with these companies.  They target people, usually adults.  Many of these adults are potential voters.  We represent content providers for them, to get the adult eyeballs they want.  And for us, they represent a distribution channel to reach our voters.

It's time we talk like this.  Social media is a business.  Let's talk business.

Many of us in election administration are resource-poor, stretched thin.  I have familiar relationships with many voting equipment vendors, for instance, but a deep relationship with only one.

That's a singular example but it carries with all of our vendors.  We need to be convinced, among any group of vendors, who represents the high-potential horse to ride.

It's possible that one of the companies on the stage (or Yahoo, Amazon, or Apple, each not in attendance but whom should be paying attention, also) will be majorly declining by 2012.  I probably wouldn't bet against the staying power of Microsoft or Google, but there are plenty of social networks that have experienced dramatic half-lives since 2000.

As demonstration of the fast pace of technology change, go back four years ago--the top tech story related to president-elect Obama and his attachment to his Blackberry.  Could the Secret Service pry it from his hand once he took office?

Now, as he prepares for his second term, could anyone ever convince him to actually use a Blackberry?

When such a new media panel is assembled in 2016, I'd like to see the members sell themselves against the others on the stage.  Tell us specific strategies and programs that are underway, how initiatives can either drive turnout, reduce phone calls on election day, or in some way reach voters cost-effectively.

Tell us how to contact someone specific at Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, for instance, and, better, why we should want to.

The Fangirl days are over, in my view.  Election administration has become extremely more sophisticated over the last 10 years.  Much more is expected of us, and we need these companies to engage with us, with their ideas, their vision.

I think it's fair for election administrators to seek to be recruited, enrolled, and engaged by them.  We have this view with other potential partners and vendors, and I believe we do ourselves a disservice thinking of social media as the shiny object in the room as opposed to expecting disciplined thinking from a maturing industry that brings potential to help our voters.

Forget Christmas--We're Thinking Easter

Outsiders to our office frequently comment how our lives must be slowing down after the November election, but the reality is that we have another election coming up in February and the election-to-election window is similar, November to February, to what it was from August to November.

Filing deadline for the spring elections is barely a month away.  The primary is at the end of February and the election is April 2.

That's April 2, as in the Tuesday after Easter.  We've had spring elections that crossed over Passover or Easter before, but they were the smaller even-year elections.  This is a countywide election and Easter is having a huge impact on our election.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (he typed in a Ferris Bueller voice), getting polling places is 10 times harder than getting election workers.  It's always a push to secure workers willing to take on a very hard job with long hours, but as I've posted before, securing polling places is even harder.

With about one-third of our polling places being churches, that fact will be on full display this spring.  We've already lost about 15 locations because of Easter, when the churches are at full capacity, unable to accept voting machines and equipment either the week before or even the Monday before the election.

Then, there is the anxious-school factor.  Schools locally, and nationally, are re-evaluating their security procedures already in the wake of the Connecticut tragedy and the stark reality is that this review will include using schools as polling places.

In 2005, I met with each school superintendent in Johnson County, introducing myself, thanking them for their support, and asking them about issues they were facing.  During my meeting with Shawnee Mission's Marjorie Kaplan, she very directly, and prophetically as it has turned out, said, "We want to work with you, but the day someone comes into a school and uses a gun is the day we stop using our schools as polling places."

She was addressing calls we get from time to time from parents concerned about the flow of persons who come into the schools on election day.  Neither of us that day considered her comments anything but a remote possibility.  Still, I've thought a lot about that conversation over the last few days.

We had the bad timing of sending out our polling place confirmation forms early Friday morning and we have since received confirmation from Shawnee Mission.  Shawnee Mission, by the way, has a long-standing policy of only placing questions on ballots during polls elections, not mail-ballot elections, so the District's interests in polling places goes a little deeper than it otherwise might.

However, the Olathe School District (the largest in the Kansas City area), is having a further review of our request and the overall use of schools as polling places.  The Connecticut shootings aren't the reason for the review; we're told the review has been underway for a while.  Still, the timing isn't good.

After my meeting with Superintendent Kaplan, we began looking at all options for polling places other than schools.  But after consolidating polling places this year from 284 to 221, we're left with about 100 schools and many of them are in Olathe.

At a minimum, because of Easter, we're facing the need to move thousands of voters to new locations in the same hurry-up mode we were in last June after the 11th-hour redistricting.  We could be looking at moving more than 100,000 voters if we don't get all of our school locations.

Beyond polling places, Holy Week wipes out some training dates.  We usually have two classes of supervising judge training on Saturday and again on the Sunday before the election.  With Sunday out, we need to find a time to train those 130 or so supervising judges.

The weekend before isn't much better because of Palm Sunday and the Saturday is already full with regular election worker training.  Holding daytime classes on Friday might work, but, of course, that's Good Friday.

Even our typical election worker training schedules are impacted because we utilize a church for that training.  We don't have an auditorium-like training environment for 200 or more workers at a time.  The church we use is packed with events and other locations are either not available or not returning our calls at this point.

The dynamics we're facing come at a time when many are weighing the value of moving spring elections to the fall.  I'm for this if we can move them to the fall of the odd years, meaning we have elections in our county every November.  Combining the spring elections with the presidential or gubernatorial elections would be costly and would greatly complicate the administration of the election. That's not to say it's a bad idea, but it's something that needs to be hashed out, I think, in a conference room before trying to debate it in a legislative hearing.

This concept, though, may have traction, too, when considering that if the elections are in November, schools, maybe, could be closed on election day, allowing for more security.  Often, we've talked with the schools about either making election day a teacher in-service day (there's usually one scheduled within a couple of weeks of an election) or actually making the November Election Day a school holiday.

There are other things that could be considered as well, many often pondered by election administrators but seldom considered by other stakeholders.  We live and breathe these issues, but legislators, for instance, have many priorities.  Burning issues to us, while important, are among many burning issues they have, and some have burned brighter.

Perhaps, the light will shine a little more on some of our issues in the coming months.   I'm hopeful we might be coming to a time where we can modernize some of our election statutes, to align them with the realities of the timing of advance voting and military/overseas voting, for instance.

We might be on the cusp of some meaningful election administration reform that might improve overall effectiveness and, possibly, voter turnout as well.  For now, we're still head-down, charging towards Easter.

Heathers

Apparently, Christian Slater, the actor, had difficulty voting in the presidential election.

I first heard this during a panel session at PEW's Voting in America 2012, an invitation-only conference of election administrators, elected officials, and smart people that I attended earlier this week in Washington, D.C.

The comment came during a discussion by Robin Carnahan, retiring Missouri Secretary of State.  She used the actor's example to point out registration issues in elections.  An inconsistency with his registration, as the story went, kept his vote from being counted in Florida.

Registration process changes are but one of many things considered as answers to the infamous President Obama quote on election night related to, "We've got to fix that."

(Random thought #21--when boarding my flight out Sunday morning, I had a pleasant stop and chat with Senator Jerry Moran.  Obviously, one discussion with just one Senator is a small sample size, but it was evident to me during that conversation that the "fix that" comment was not anywhere near top of mind in the U.S. Senate).

(Random thought #186--you may wonder why random thoughts are numbered, if they are random, and I must point out that they are numbered solely for the convenience of the reader).

Anyway, the session before the Christian Slater example was much more impactful, in my opinion.  Heather Gerken led a panel to discuss the creation of PEW's Election Performance Index that will be rolling out soon.

Heather started this all with her book, The Democracy Index, and the whole concept here is using data to measure performance.  It gets to the foundation of Stephen Covey's concept of, "Put something on a wall and measure it, and it will improve."

Heather is a rock star when it comes to elections--not to be confused with another Heather, Heather Smith of Rock the Vote.  She spoke on Monday and is very impressive as well.

They are two of my favorite Heathers.  A third, not at the conference, is Heather Taylor of E-Consultancy, who posted about social media and elections coincidentally the first day of the conference.  I highly recommend following her on Twitter.

There, three Heathers and Christian Slater (sort of) together over two days, but this wasn't a movie with a bomb, although it was broadcast on CSpan3 and we were beginning to evacuate the Newseum just before the conference began because of some safety issue that was quickly resolved.

I'll speak to one of the other panels, related to social media, in a future post, but sticking to the Performance Index, it is something that we want to nudge along in Johnson County.  I'll have some discussion about the Index itself later as well, but Heather Gerken's book is a good read in the interim.

Panel Discussion on the PEW
Election Performance Index--Former
(and outstanding) EAC Commissioner
Ray Martinez, Michigan Election
Director Chris Thomas, Smartguy
MIT professor Charles Stewart, and
PEW Index Champion Zachary
Markovits.  Behind the podium
is Heather Gerkin--you see her boots
only, presumably used to kick
tails and take names (and
numbers).

The great thing about the Index is that it is happening.  The bad thing is that no matter how it's prefaced as a discussion-starter or preliminary, first impressions are lasting impressions.  When all of us see the data, we immediately look to to see how our state has done. 

The next debate is whether these are the right measurements or are they equally weighted or what the most important measurement is or even if the measurements themselves are accurate or if we are measuring apples-to-apples.

"Wait time," for instance, is something measured but it doesn't break down if the voter voted in advance or at the polls.  And, it's self-reported by the voter, so it may actually be the perception of the wait, not the actual time.  That perception may be more important, or less, but this gives you a tiny taste of the discussions that might spin from the data.

A trendy job these days is that of Data Scientist, tracking "Big Data," and breaking it down into insightful bites.  We need a Data Scientist at the Johnson County Election Office.

For that matter, we need a financial and strategic planning manager, an outreach manager, and at least three more employees to simply assist with election blocking and tackling so we aren't dependent solely on one person without a backup at critical points in the election cycle.

We haven't been able to get those basic needs filled, having the same number of employees for the last 20 years despite seismic changes in elections administration, although we're going to take another swing that that during the next budget cycle.  Still, a push for a Data Scientist would only result in eye rolls--we'd have a better chance getting another trendy (and not needed) position, a Sustainability Manager.  We need the real positions to ensure we can sustain administering elections, so I likely won't push for a Data Scientist.

To me, that's the biggest risk with the Performance Index.  The benefits, I believe anyway, can't be disputed.  But without devoting a resource to really get our fingernails dirty with the data, we run the risk of the wrong people seeing the wrong metric and drawing false conclusions, good or bad.

It's a good start, but I'm sure I'm about 60 days or so from getting a call from our local radio news station wanting a quote on how Kansas fared on the Performance Index.  In some ways, the Index truly will be the bomb I referenced earlier and if my anecdotal "Fix That," research is any indication, we'll be talking about the Index much longer than a line from a presidential acceptance speech.

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.