Gushiness For Our Workers

I've compared before that elections are like having a newborn baby, where as time passes from the sleepless nights, only the more pleasant memories remain.

Yesterday's election worker training--the first for February and the first since November's election--reminded me of this.

Each of the 75 in attendance worked in November and while I still remember some of the pain--them, not so much.

We had a couple of polling places, for instance, that didn't utilize signs the way we cover in training.  This seemed monumental to me on election day, when I was at the pinnacle of my over-functioning self.

Standing in the front of the room, pointing out the correct sign placement, this seemed much more minor to me yesterday.

I asked about their opinion on the need for two poll books at all locations and didn't get a reaction.  I saw shrugs of shoulders and heads softly nodding no, not some sort of pent-up rage that I somehow expected.  I was anticipating the raising of pitchforks and a scream of "Hell's Yeah!" 

That didn't happen.

Listening to myself during training, I realized there were moments to point out what a good job they did in November:

1. In general, they managed the largest test of the new photo ID law very well.
2. They did an excellent job understanding provisional ballot situations.  We have a process where persons who request to vote on paper vote in a streamlined way, non-provisional.  If the worker makes a mistake, though, and the ballot should have been provisional, we don't collect enough information to be able to count the ballot.  That's bad and something we emphasize.  We call paper-ballot requestors "Gold Voters," so they don't feel intimidated by asking for paper, but we also stress to our workers that if there is confusion on their part, it's always better to have the ballot provisional, so we know it will count, vs. assuming it's a Gold Voter and be wrong.  Gold Voters must be in the poll book.  Our workers handled these situations exceptionally in November.
3. Further, and on some level this is glorifying what should be the ordinary but it is a big deal, I have never had a voter call me with an issue attempting to vote where the voter wasn't, at a minimum, offered the opportunity to cast a provisional ballot.  That's how it should be, of course, but many things "should be" and I'm thankful this is "is" as well.
4. Voter complaints, as we realized during our post-mortem review, were limited primarily to two polling places that were our two with lines most of the morning.  Those two had lines under control by 11 a.m.
5. Our election workers received compliments from poll agents.  Poll agents (observers) often are called into duty at the 11th hour, but they also often are influentials--elected officials and former candidates.  We instruct our workers to treat them likely family, embrace them, give them their best robe and sandals, slaughter the fattest calf, and make them feel welcome.  I'm not sure our workers always went that far, but they did a good job working with poll agents.
6. Our workers handled more voters at the polls than any other election in Johnson County history.  Because of our consolidation of polling places, traffic at each polling place was 50 percent higher than 2008's presidential election (and that election had a record 78 percent turnout).

I'm not a person who remembers to gush appreciation.  Further, election administrators, by their nature, tend to focus on what didn't work as opposed to what went right.  Eection administrators are typically the ones who might get a "99" on a test and instead of celebrating, dwell on the 1 problem missed.

I feel the need to be gushy today.  Johnson County is very fortunate to have hundreds of persons who give 14 hours for roughly $100.  The February 26 election may be an exercise in dealing with boredom, but last November was a test under pressure, and they performed terrifically.

More training is scheduled for Saturday.  Gushiness is also on the agenda.

The Fuse Has Been Lit

This morning we're preparing to mail about 1,000 advance ballots for the February 26 election, the first day we can mail ballots, and also reviewing a mail-ballot election schedule requested by a school district.

It's happening as the Postal Service is announcing that it will stop delivering mail on Saturday.

Forget the "future of voting," as many want to discuss.  The present is drying up.

This follows yesterday's election administration news, where the New York Times summed up efforts related to reduce long lines at polling places.

One method of reducing lines is already in motion--eliminating polling places.  We're facing the possibility of losing several schools as polling places.

The Times article quotes a survey of waiting times per state in the presidential election  (Kansas was at 11.5 minutes) .  That same survey also looked nationally at voters' confidence that their vote would count as cast and only 56 percent who voted by mail answered affirmatively, compared to 67 percent at the polls and 65 percent in advance. 

In this same survey, 18 percent of the respondents said they had requested a ballot by mail but didn't get it.  These were national numbers, but I think they at least suggest that the Postal Service has more issues than just financial issues.

Without Saturday postal delivery, Johnson County voters who get ballots issued on the last day allowed by law (the Friday before the election) will have no way to turn them around and know they were delivered by Tuesday. There likely will be others who will find they need the Saturday delivery 10 days before the election to get their ballot before going out of town the following Monday morning and now otherwise will be unable to vote in an election.

In my view, eliminating any day of delivery is a mistake.  It's the beginning of what I've termed in other industries as the Light the Fuse Strategy.

I first coined the Light the Fuse Strategy when evaluating options while working as director of strategic planning at Sprint 10 years ago. We saw voice calls moving to calls over data facilities and wireline minutes shifting to wireless minutes.

We saw a large part of our revenues and margins evaporating, but we didn't stop letting people call on Saturdays. We recognized that shrinking to survive was not the answer.

Jettisoning an unprofitable part of the business can be a smart strategic move.  But shrinking to survive, or worse--thinking you are shrinking to grow--can be a terrible approach. Look at US News and Newsweek.  Those magazines still exist, virtually.  The fuse is nearing the end for them as well.
 

Here in town, how many of you remember The Olathe Daily News?  I remember a few columns in the Olathe News over the last few years that said the paper was changing its delivery schedule, but, not to worry, it was going to be stronger than ever.  

Now, the Daily News is a tiny insert in the Saturday Kansas City Star, which itself has shrunk to the point that the Monday edition often could benefit from some pebbles in the bag when tossed on driveways to keep the paper from blowing down the street.

 

I'm not pretending there are easy answers for what the Postal Service is going through.   But I do believe that they've created a victim mentality instead of creatively addressing the problem.

They have a huge competency in that they go to every home six days a week. Surely that can be exploited within other industries.

Instead, the Postal Service is eroding its core competency.

 

I believe, just like the transitions in the newspapers that used to be daily (that also went to homes, by the way), delivery stopping on Saturday is just the beginning.   The fuse will have been lit.

Eventually, mail will only be delivered, for instance, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Every change will decrease the importance of the Postal Service and, in turn, reduce the mail to be delivered, leading to the spiral.  The fuse will be burning.

It's rough for us because elections is an industry that is actually looking to increase the use of the Postal Service.  I can't think of another industry that is in that mode. 

So, the Future of Voting is now.  We are in the future.

Unfortunately, that's not intended to be some sort of inspirational message. 

In elections, we often deal with yesterday's issues.  And, we look at equipment issues as future issues.  The number one future issue is pretty basic--how are people going to vote in next presidential election?
 

In Johnson County, 340,000 people will vote for president in 2016.  Right now, I don't know how we will accomplish that.

I don't know that I will have enough sites available for polling places.  I don't know that voter confidence will continue with the mail service.  I don't even know what service level we'll get from the Postal Service.

Vote centers (mega polling places) are more and more likely, but they will be expensive sites to lease.

I'm not necessarily a proponent for Internet Voting, but I'm not an opponent, and it's quickly becoming the gorilla in the room.

I've often heard the proverbial gorilla described as a 600-pound gorilla and also as an 800-pound gorilla.  I've never known which weight was correct, but my hunch now is that the 600-pounder will become an 800-pounder as the sound of the latest burning fuse gets louder.

The Post Office Steps Up

It's been nearly a year since I met with the postmaster at the Olathe Post Office regarding our concerns with mail delivery, and I'd like to say things have been better.

That's what I'd like to say.

However, today we have progress. We can thank Tammy Patrick from Maricopa County, Arizona, for that.

Tammy carried our water in one of her meetings with the Post Office as part of a Western Region Focus Group. We're part of the Mid-America Region, but they had a representative at the meeting as well.

So, that person told a friend, who told a friend, and so on, and so on, and so on...

And, I got a call from a manager in Kansas City.  We talked this morning and I've never been more encouraged.

In fairness to purists of the definition of "encouraged," I've never actually been encouraged when it came to the postal service.  The postal service here regularly represents one of my personal Four Horsemen of Despair (the others being my newspaper delivery man, Time Warner Cable--whom I happily dispatched last year in favor of local company Surewest, and our trash/recyling company).

I sent our new contact the photos I gathered and have posted here.  He asked that I stay in touch with him and let him know of elections we have underway.  He said he understood that this was a period where elections weren't going on.

Not so fast, my new Postal Point Man!

I was happy to be able to immediately take him up on this.  We send out ballots on Wednesday for the spring primary, so I'll be able to test his resolve immediately.

It may not look like much, but having the local postmaster meet with me and now receiving this call from Kansas City, where all ballots pass through, is more action than I was able to trigger in my first seven years here.  My annual surveys sent to the post office were intercepted or not read, because some of my cries for help that I wrote likely would have made the receipt-writing pastor at Applebee's blush.

Cheers to Tammy Patrick, Johnson County's best friend voters didn't know they have.  Tammy's famous in the industry for being extremely thorough, as well as living proof of one my key theories of life--everything comes down to Powerpoint.  She's a Powerpoint expert (she probably has a Powerpoint presentation on how she uses Powerpoint), and many of us have pirated slides from her.

Thanks to her, there's hope for improvement. 

Speaking of ballots, they should arrive from our printer late this afternoon.  It will be our first test of the printer since some personnel changes.  Things (assuming "things" mean "communications") have gone well thus far, but we're anxious to get these ballots, get them in the mail next week, and begin to see the results of the new postal attention in action.

Perhaps soon we really will be able to say things are better.

We're Not So Different, You and I

I'm a big believer in the concept that everything happens for a reason.

Of course it does.  I also believe, though, that the phrase is often the cry of the desperate. When we can't make sense of something, the belief that there MUST be a reason that will unfold provides some comfort.

Truly enlightened people know the reason as it happens.

I'd love to say I'm truly enlightened, but I try, I try.  My "Happens for a Reason Awareness" grade would probably be "marginally enlightened."

My enlightenment limitations were evident earlier this month.  Closing out takeaways from the Election Center conference, I listened to many of my peers talk about the Great Line Issue of 2012, which actually was no different than the Great Line Issue of 2008, as was pointed out in the conference.

It's common to go to an industry event and realize, in retrospect, that others had the same experiences.  But, if I was truly enlightened, I would have realized that as it was happening.  It would have, at the very least, reduced some stress.

For context, first realize that tone can make the same situation positive or negative.

Years ago, my daughter's fifth-grade classmate, as an example, had a birthday party for the boys in his class.  It was a small class with fewer than 10 boys.  The mother had the boys picked up after school for their raucous evening of video games and pizza in a limousine.

That resulted in parents asking the same question in their own circles.

"Can you believe they picked the boys up in a limousine?"

Said with excitement, the $10 splurge per boy sounded pretty fun.  Said with disdain, the $10 splurge became an example of everything wrong with society.

I reported lines in advance voting causing great concern among voters in 2012.  The same lines in 2008 oozed excitement in our electoral process.  Similar to the limousine quote, same story, different tone.

Even during advance voting, my peers were seeing the same thing.  That doesn't change what we should do next, but I wish I would have realized that at the time.  I would have had at least a better perspective of what was happening.

"Is it me, diary?" wouldn't have been asked as often.

The Great Line Issue of 2012 is now, in my view, simply a distraction.  It was mentioned again in the presidential inauguration speech and even if we could agree on what a line is, or what an acceptable line is, there is no way to build one ramp on one highway big enough to prevent a line at some point.  To quote the president at a different time, "It's math."

But the issue does arise at a time when, as administrators, we're ready to do more.  That may not be by choice--as we prepare for our spring primary, everything we count on is tenuous.  Schools, post offices, and printers lead the list.

In Johnson County, we saw the second half of 2013 as a chance to organize, dust ourselves off, and shine up for 2014.  Now, the second half of 2013 is possibly going to be the most important six months of time I've spent in this job.  Everything we do operationally has to be on the table.

Because of the line issue, election administrators across the country will be going through the same thing.  We've spent the last few years absorbing the impacts of the Help America Vote Act and wanting to stabilize any election changes, not from fear of change but in recognition that the speed of change could hurt the voter experience.

I've often said that elections are a bit like having a newborn baby.  You give up your friends, never sleep, love the opportunity but curse adulthood, and then, after about a year of seeing the outcome, you forget many of the sacrifices.  "Let's have another!," and the cycle begins again.

We'll close out our spring elections in need of that time to forget the sacrifices of 2012.  But our uncertainty gives us a chance to make the second half of 2013 more meaningful.  It will let us nest with confidence in preparation of our 2014 baby.

And, if nothing else, there is comfort now in realizing that others throughout the country are going through the exact same thing at the exact same time.  We have a chance, in this case anyway, to be among the truly enlightened.

We're entering a new era in election administration.  If not new, it's different.  We're on the cusp of profound change driven from within.  Collectively, there is an innovation movement.  The efforts are different point-to-point, but they are efforts that won't be pushed by legislation.

There is some chest puffery, some goodwill bills, but in the end, nothing is going to happen because someone outside the industry said so.  Positive change is coming from those on the ground.

The reason, maybe, is the Great Line Issue of 2012--not because it highlighted a problem but instead raised awareness of solutions already underway.

For us, though, it's on:  a spring primary in a few cities, ballot preparation, and election worker scheduling.  The focus of the spring elections will be the focus of the next few posts.

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: