Fuzzy but Depressing Math

Did you know that 37.1 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot?

It's true.  I just calculated that.

The relevance to that statistic comes in the spreadsheet I've posted below.  There are likely some aspects of fuzzy math here and the cliche, "You can use statistics to say anything," comes to mind.

Still, these numbers came from the county's budget group and you'll see that the election office has had budgets cut, by percentage, more than any other department since 2006.

I got these yesterday as we considered more costs for 2013, when we likely will lose two positions to retirement.  We're a poorly timed illness away from disaster as it is, and how could anyone conclude differently when looking at the sheet below?

I just talked with someone from a group where I'll be speaking tomorrow night and one of the questions she posed about Photo ID involved outreach.  Specifically, she said our online materials were very good but asked what we were doing to reach people who don't have computers?

The same question applies, I replied, for any outreach related to elections, not just Photo ID.

We have no money.  I've learned to barter with nothing but goodwill.  We stumble across talented groups and persons who want to be part of the election process because they believe in the importance of elections.  These people, like Whitworth Ballou, the agency we used in 2008 and the Secretary of State has enlisted this cycle, perform outreach tasks for us for pennies on the dollar.

At some point, it's all going to break.

The chart below gives an indication as to why.  The large chunks taken are from years with November elections and, as I said about fuzzy math, some of that likely came back to our department as the year ended.  It was placed in something called "countywide," which really is a rainy day fund for the county.  I know we tapped into it in 2010.  On the other hand, I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances related to the cuts in other departments, too.

Still, if only half this amount was cut (and it was definitely more than half), we'd still be among the cut leaders.

Budget cuts2

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Productivity in a 16-Hour Day

One of the oddities of elections is that election day is usually a great day to get things done.

Maybe it's because we're here for about 16 hours and a 16-hour day simply is more productive than a typical day.  Another reason, though, is that we leave the calendar as open as possible, free from meetings, to be ready to respond to any issue.  When issues don't arise, there is a large block of free time that can be put to good use.

The day after the election is usually busier, particularly if there are close races that could be decided by provisional ballots.  Usually, some unhappy voters call on election day but most tend to call the day after.

Election days, then, become a good day for a new thing on Election Diary.  I've resisted having posts that are a collection of smaller ideas, sort of a compendium of things, a "This and That," "Election Notes," or "Etcetera" kind of thing.

If I have those things, I will begin putting them into a Tuesday post, maybe on an election day or just a random Tuesday, but always on a Tuesday.

One such random item comes from the Wall Street Journal today and relates to a comment I made during the ITIF Elections and Disabilities conference last week.

If the concept of "Bring Your Own Voting Machine," that I first described last month here takes off, a natural extension of that is that your mobile device can become your portal to getting your election information, your election preferences (such as type size on your ballot), and the ballot-rendering device itself.

A natural question involves the equivalent of the digital divide--will those without data-enabled phones be disadvantaged? 

We're looking well into the future with this, at least 3-5 years.  The smartphone and tablet adoption rate will be well over 70 percent by then.

I think the bigger divide is the cost of the data service itself.  Many persons who have smartphones don't have unlimited data, and with spectrum squeezes, we can expect the price of data service to increase.  Someone may have a smartphone, but use it mostly with wi-fi and therefore they wouldn't engage as much when mobile.

I suggested that there could be some sort of public service data that was free, much the way calls to 9-1-1 are free.  Data using a particular app on the phone or to specific websites could be free.

At least one person didn't agree that this was an issue. 

As People's Exhibit A to my point of view, however, I bring you an article in today's Wall Street Journal.

AT&T is considering billing Application Makers for the data their apps generate. 

Personally, I think this is crazy because it's akin to Time Warner billing ESPN for the number of viewers who watch a particular game.  Users already pay AT&T for the access to the apps.

It shows, though, that there is a need to better recover the cost of capital to build out the data networks.  Sprint, for instance, (where I worked for nearly 20 years) has an overwhelming capital expense number in front of it in order to provide higher-speed data service.

John Donovan, AT&T's chief technology officer, discussed this during an interview at the Mobile World Congress.  John, as a consultant with Deloitte, worked with me on Sprint's wholesale strategy, and first and foremost, he's a futurist.  I'm sure this was more thinking out loud than a policy statement.

But, telecommunication carriers are the epitome of "Me-Too" companies.  If this makes sense to AT&T, it will make sense to the others.  And, one way they can sell this concept to the Federal Communications Commission is to have public service apps free from these data costs.

John says as much in the interview, comparing some apps to 800 numbers where the data is free.

There's a window, here, I think for something central to elections, like the Voting Info Project to own the "800 app" for elections.


LIVE STREAMING

We do this on election night.  Somehow, showing everyone how we run around checking things in provides some comfort that things are moving along.  The link will be posted on election nights on the Johnson County Election Office website.  The attached picture is from the computer we have in the warehouse, so people know how to get out of the view if they need to sneeze.

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.

One Part Experience, One Part Economy

I've just returned from Atlanta, where I spent the last two days in an Accessible Elections Design Workshop put on by ITIF, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

This was the second one conducted, each time with a different group of participants.  The whole scoop is at http://elections.itif.org.

The workshop was very well organized and I've attached the workbook, which is a great model for ideation efforts in any industry.  The workshop featured graphic artists from Georgia Tech who made our ideas pop.

Accessible Elections Design Workshop

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ITIF is posting the designs and is looking for specific input from you, dear reader, here: http://elections.itif.org/projects/open-innovation-challenge/

We split into four groups and if there was a common theme, in my opinion, it was that there feels like a movement is afoot to create an improved and personalized voter experience.  I know there's been talk in the elections industry around the experience, but it feels pervasive now.

I'm sure that when transit professionals gather, they talk about the rider experience.  Same, I bet, for the library experience.  Heck, I know that in Johnson County, inmates often are called corrections customers.

Difference is, there's money in those parts of government.  I know elections are expensive, but that's largely because of the volume of persons served--it's just a scale thing.  Take 500,000 registered voters and an election that costs just $2 per registered voter and you've spent a million dollars.

$2 doesn't buy much of an experience anywhere.  I don't even think it pays for a ticket on our transit system, and it certainly won't be enough for bail for our corrections customers.

In fact, I bought a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper in the Atlanta airport  after the conference for $2.68 and that experience, from Freshen's Yogurt, wasn't as satisfying as casting my vote tomorrow will be in the Shawnee city primary.

Elections are expensive but that's because they are inclusive, for everyone, and when you count up everyone, that's a large number.  Elections aren't expensive because of the unit costs.  Elections are expensive because we have so many units.

This workshop and effort is focused on persons with disabilities.  I've learned that the largest disability bloc is comprised of persons who may not consider themselves disabled.

That makes the true experience opportunity something that is focused on person-first, then the disability (if any).  If we're living in the Experience Economy, though, we're going to have to devote some thought to the Economy part, too.

For today, though, Hail the Experience!  Part of getting somewhere is having a map, and here's small piece of ours from today.  I need some soak time myself to explain it better and I will in another post soon:

A key but subtle word here is "effective" voter participation.
More later.

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.

Election Fatigue and the Move to November

Last spring's city election turnout of less than 10 percent invited thoughts of moving the city elections to the November even years, piling on with the presidential or gubernatorial elections and riding the coat tails of the higher turnout.

You won't get any argument from me that we could benefit from fewer elections.  We've averaged six a year since I've been here.  We just wrapped up the 43rd in my time and are working on number 44 February 28.

Of the 44, however, 23 were non-scheduled special elections.  Many were mail-ballot elections.

So, if cost synergies provide the motive for consolidating elections, I say, look first at the low-hanging fruit.

That fruit comes in 23 unscheduled elections that could have been free to taxpayers, or nearly free.  The items on the ballots might have tipped a second ballot page or otherwise created a cost, but generally they represent costs that could have been avoided.

In Kansas, countywide elections are completely funded by the county.  Less-than-countywide elections share costs with the county.  The county pays for sunk costs and the jurisdiction pays all incremental costs. Postage, paper, and election workers are the primary incremental costs.

If, instead of cost synergies, turnout is the motive for consolidation, that's a bit iffy.  It's likely that the races toward the bottom of the ballot will have a significant drop-off in voters.  Still, even a 50 percent November turnout surely will result in city council votes of more than 10 percent by the time voters make their way to the end of the ballot.

We've seen this at the county, where a good number of voters for the U.S. Senate, for instance, didn't vote for their county commissioner.

Still, consolidating elections seems wise to me.  There are likely political pros and cons, and that would have to be sorted by the Kansas Legislature.  The House is considering a very long bill for this very thing and I provided input to the fiscal note yesterday.

On the surface, the concept combines the highest turnout election with the most complicated one to administer.  In the spring elections, we have to rotate candidate names and this results in more ballot styles.  We already have 1,500 different types of ballots in August and 500 in November.

The biggest issue I see beyond resource needs would be that communities truly would need to prohibited from chartering out of the change.  Otherwise, all we will do is have city elections in November AND April.

That brings up a different issue that we election administrators know.  Whenever there is a question of, "When we will move to this? (such as Internet voting)," we know the question really is, "When we will add this to what we are doing?"

Advance voting, for instance, didn't eliminate voting at the polls.  It just added to the repertoire.  Internet voting, if it happens, likely won't replace voting at the polls.  It will be an additional item on the voting menu.

Back on point:

The bill looks like it attempts to address the possibility of jurisdictions opting out of the move to November.  The other real issue from our standpoint comes down to resources.

This change would require staffing increases.  As typed a couple of times, we're steady at the same number of staff members we had 20 years ago and we're facing being unable to backfill two who retire in 2013.

Forget the soft talk of "unfunded mandates."  If the bill doesn't require that counties fund the staffing needs as proposed by county election officers (regardless if the state or county pays), this move will fail.  Even if the bill spells out that our office must add three persons, our county processes will still require that we sleep on it, we pray on it, demonstrate six alternatives considered to not add the resources, and, all in all, nearly tie up a full-time person (me) for several months before approval.

Or, realistically, we'd be told that while those persons were required by legislation, our existing staff wasn't.  So, deal.

One benefit of the April election from my standpoint is workload distribution.  That's not a good reason to keep elections in April but it is a factor when considering moving them.

Elections are expensive, and too many elections fatigue voters and lower turnout.  Consolidating elections, in my view, is absolutely the right discussion to be having.  I don't know if this bill is the answer, but hopefully it can lead to a meaningful dialog and a long-term solution.

Active Readers, Inactive Voters

The smart people at PEW have released a study about the number of voters in registration databases who may not live where they are registered.

This has reminded others of that rocket scientist (really) at kansaswatchdog.org who did the same a couple of years ago.   (By the way, for you out-of-Kansans, he's a must-follow).

But, ahem!  This is news?

Not to regular readers of ElectionDiary.com!  

Okay, if you are a reader, I've only been around six weeks and I'm touched you've checked the blog out and all, but it's a little egotistical on my part to think of you as a regular reader.

I haven't earned that yet.  I get that.

But, I did speak to this very thing here:

http://electiondiary-briandnewby.blogspot.com/2012/01/our-board-is-special.html

and here:

http://electiondiary-briandnewby.blogspot.com/2012/01/fractions-onions-and-inactive-voters.html

PEW mentions that 1 in 8 voters don't live where they are registered.  These would be inactive voters, which I discussed.  The PEW graphic mentions "active" voters; I think it's a blending of terms, so hone in the 1 out of 8, not the categorization of voters.

And, because I often figure baseball batting averages after the second game of the season, I've memorized what 1 for 8 is:  .125, or 12.5 percent.

My blog posts mentioned 10 percent as the typical number of inactive voters in Johnson County.  I was rounding.

I'll give you 12.5 percent, maybe.  (I don't think we're dramatically better than the average, but certainly we're not worse).

But isn't this a legal thing, a savvy reader might ask?  How can you really be better or worse?

Well, in larger communities bordering a state line, like Johnson County, there's a lot of voters coming and going, making list management even more important.  The fact that we send a couple of postcards a year helps.

Small communities, especially, don't have the resources to actively manage the registration lists.

Speaking of resources, the hot topic in Kansas is the consideration of moving spring elections to the fall.  As an election administrator, this...well...I have to say, it freaks me out.

Pulling back 50,000 feet (30,000 just isn't high enough here), there's really no reason our city elections are in the spring, as far as I know.  They just are in the spring.  Surely there is a way to make this idea work and keep the heart rate low.

I'll elaborate on that tomorrow.