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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79230942247204191142015-03-22T11:33:38.811-07:00Election DiaryA Kansas Election Administrator's Preparation for Presidential Elections and Beyond.Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-15055520956648772682015-03-22T11:33:00.002-07:002015-03-22T11:33:38.821-07:00Spring ForwardYesterday may have been the first day of Spring, but we've been in spring mode for a few months and, technically, springboard mode much longer.

My buddy Mindy Moretti at Electionline.org just wrote an article about the number of special elections across the country, and we're a poster child for such a thing.

Here, we're charter members of the Election of the Month Club, working on our 13th election in the last 12 months. I said the same in February, so it's really been about a 14-month string.

Rumor has it that there might be a recall effort afoot in a school district and there's one more district has to decide if there is value in having a special election by July (the others did in January). That's just what we know of.

The day after the April 2013 election, for instance, we received a phone call from the city of Overland Park regarding a mail-ballot election. It was a renewal of a tax. Special elections often are for taxes that require another vote for renewal, so some of that may come up this year.

In addition, the Kansas legislature is getting closer to making substantive changes to the election cycles.

We've already seen the city of Los Angeles move city elections to the fall of even years, starting in 2020, but Kansas had such an initiative top of mind for a few years now. If something passes this spring in Kansas, it likely will have more of an appearance of "me too" nationally, but it was unrelated.

Regardless, the big question for us, it seems, isn't if changes will pass, but whether they will be for even or odd years. I prefer odd, elections every August and November.

We'll see how this plays out in the next month.

Such a change may buy us a bit of time in our plans to identify a new voting system. Our initial plan (hope) was to make the spring 2017 elections the last with our current system. We haven't made the progress we'd like in this area (see "13 elections in the last 12 months") so seeing the last use of the system move to the fall of 2017 artificially makes it seem like we have more time.

We're still hoping to implement in 2018. If nothing else, we might be able to try something in parallel if the elections are in the fall.

For now, same ol' drill--election worker assignments, election worker training beginning Tuesday, scheduling headaches because the election is right after Easter weekend and, of course, the Kansas Jayhawks, should they advance to the NCAA championship game, would play that game the night before the Spring election.

My experience has been that when the Jayhawks are assumed to be advancing, they've never been a worry come election day. This year, with no expectations and all eyes on Kentucky, and as busy as we've been, Murphy's Law may come into play.

No complaints, if so. After all, the Royals made a run to the World Series during the fall election and cities tend to land these "all or nothing" sports scenarios. Kansas City deserves it all. If that adds more stress to us on election day because polling places may not be open or workers may have overslept--keeping in mind we're numb anyway--that's stress we'll be happy to take on.

Mostly, we'll just be happy for the chance at a break in the Election of the Month streak.. I remember the good ol' days when we averaged an election every other month.

Of course, there will be more time for updating.

I'm sorry, Dear Reader, if you think I've lost my zest for typing. It's been hard to find time. There is no shortage of material, and I hope to get back to that soon.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-84774237218260751272015-03-10T19:45:00.000-07:002015-03-11T07:42:25.581-07:00Elections at the Speed of LifeAside from the incredible busyness of elections, I've been leading a couple of graduate courses at Baker University.

I'm teaching two on-ground and one online.

Last night, a student in Topeka asked a very understandable question:

"Why can't we vote electronically?"

Electronically, in this context, meant from a computer, on the Internet.

I ran by the whole Election Assistance Commission, certification, Help America Vote Act, and all kinds of other data points from the last decade.

And then I said the obvious:

"The election industry doesn't travel at the speed of life."

That's not a bad thing. But, for instance, we have oversized palm pilots for voting machines.

The industry does its part to ensure that the postal service has plenty of mail to deliver 6 days a week.

And yet, it's getting harder to say, with a straight face, why Internet voting isn't even a gleam in the eye.

I asked all of the students about voting online.

"Why not, we pay bills on line?" they said.

People take their voting rights seriously, but in my informal surveys over the year, they are more protective of their money than they are their city council vote.

The students quickly brought up all kinds of data breaches--Target and Home Depot, for instance (this is an MBA class, after all, and they were all business).

But in my own business days, I encountered a guy who worked with me on a particular sales account at Sprint. He used a phrase all of the time, "the red-faced test," which, best I could tell, meant an answer he wasn't embarrassed to tell.

Pricing or delivery times for new products had to pass the red-faced test, for instance.

In the election world, I think we need to take the same red-faced-test approach with online voting, or at least online ballot marking, where the ballot is prepared and stored to be taken to a polling place.

At some point, giving answers like I gave last night, to smart MBA students, will discredit me as an instructor.

Imagine if that happens in an online course.

At least it wouldn't be a fail of a red-faced-test because they wouldn't see me. In such a case, maybe it would be a white-knuckle test.

Either way, it's becoming more of an odd question to answer outside of the election industry. Life moves electronically, over the Internet specifically.

Explaining why voting electronically is scary is a bit like denouncing that gravity is real or that puppies are cute.

At the very least, as we look at new voting systems, whether they be part of a device a person owns or use a device at a polling place, there seems to be growing acceptance of ballot-marking systems. In some cases, users can beam their pre-populated ballot to a terminal that calls it up on screen for review before being cast.

This is true innovation in the election world, but a yawner in the real world. Still, it's movement, maybe not at the speed of life but certainly movement that may give life to voting electronically.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-79136643556472993402015-03-01T18:48:00.001-08:002015-03-02T09:54:18.336-08:00Pinkie CollierThere's much to blog about, I'm behind, we have an election Tuesday, and it does seem like I've done way too many memorial posts here.

But this past week, our office lost a dear friend, Clinton "Pinkie " Collier, who worked as a field supervisor during my 10 years at the office and well before, to the point no one actually remembers when he started.

Pinkie was a former mayor of Shawnee, so as a former city council member there, I traded many anecdotes with him.

He also mentored my son, when he was in college, as a field supervisor. Whenever I saw Pinkie, he asked how my son was.

Most touching, he was buried in an election office shirt--complete the with "VOTE" logo we have on our apparel.

It's further recognition of a city of Shawnee connection, definitely, to our office.

The county's second election commissioner, 1958-1962, was Marvin Rainey, later Overland Park mayor and Shawnee city attorney.

There's Pinkie, and yours truly.

My predecessor, Connie Schmidt, was city clerk at neighboring city Merriam. I lived in Merriam before Shawnee.

Tuesday's election day will bring back some memories of Pinkie. Here's to a perfect election in his honor.

 Here's the link from the city:

 http://www.cityofshawnee.org/WEB/ShawneeCMS.nsf/vwNews/21DE42800372CB5686257DF60076B947?OpenDocument

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-74762507171040659752015-02-19T09:07:00.001-08:002015-02-19T09:15:31.866-08:00Amidst the ChaosIt may be 2015, but our advance voting options for 2016 are front and center with the news that the Great Mall in Olathe will be closing this year.

Far from a perfect location, the facility was good for us and helped offload traffic from our office.

Combined with the fact that we have no central county solution (maybe, the King Louie site will be ready for July 2016, but I think that's fairly iffy) and that our building is stressed, advance voting has become a big-time issue.

That's also because we will need at least 100 more polling places in 2016 than we had in 2014. We wont find them, which makes advance voting sites all the more important.

With the economy improving, advance locations are more scarce. Plus, we can't negotiate for these until January, at the earliest, of next year. No landlord of vacant space now wants to admit the space will be vacant, still, a year from now.

This likely will increase voting costs dramatically.

I've already tried to brace anyone who will listen that election costs in 2016 will be at least $1.5 million more than they were in 2014.

This isn't negotiable. In what likely will be another jump from reality, it's already been proposed by the county manager's budget office to us that people will just have to wait in line longer in 2016.

So much for those presidential commission on election administration recommendations making it through the National Association of Counties....

That's the wrong answer, of course.

Something will have to give when the budget is developed, but it won't be our voters.

We're looking at the potential for an 80 percent turnout in 2016, with more registered voters than 2012. We have lost two advance sites since 2012 and nearly 100 polling places.

First things first, we're in a stretch of 7 election days in 11 weeks. Training for the spring primary begins Saturday.

Currently, I'm out of town for an ES&S National Advisory Board, and that always leads to voting systems for the future, a theme that circles back to our budget.

In the backdrop, we've had some legislative action related to moving spring elections to the fall, as well as the hope that schools will be required by law to be used as a polling places. Like all of this, these are more moving pieces that we will be balancing and syncing this year.

Amidst the chaos--our new normal. My goal is to clear the chaos by January 1, as a glidepath to 2016.

That's goal in itself will lead to 10 months of chaos. The good news is we're about a year into the chaos plan, so 10 months seems like the last mile.

Here's hoping.Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-80099007972898074542015-02-11T11:02:00.004-08:002015-02-11T11:03:16.400-08:00Musings on a TuesdayIt's Tuesday, and a good time for election-day related post.

The theme, though, is fairly tired, but heating up nonetheless.

Tomorrow, there will be a bill heard in the Kansas Senate regarding the movement of spring elections to the fall of even years.

Last week, I testified in the House related to a different bill, one related to an issue I've been advocating--a school holiday for election day so that schools can be used as polling places in an era where parents worry more and more about their children's safety outside of their home.

Hopefully, these two bills will converge, so that, at least, as the merits of moving the elections to the fall, at all, or even or odd years, will have the backdrop of schools as polling places.

A discussion during the testimony in the House also captures my thinking for the Senate bill.

In the House, I was asked if schools required to be polling places was a "nice to have" or a "must have" going forward.

My opinion, I stated, is that there is always a way, always another solution. I want schools to be polling places, and we need 100 more in 2016 than we had in 2014. That's not likely to occur, even if we have this bill as law, but it is much more likely than if no action is taken.

Without this, we'll manage. The election will be conducted, maybe with longer lines, likely with more advance voting sites, higher rent paid for sites, and with more staff expense.

I'd like to say it was a must have, I testified, but there are other alternatives, just much more costly alternatives.

That's my same view with the move of elections to the fall of even years.

I prefer, for many reasons already stated in this blog, the move of elections to the fall of odd years. That way, voters will become accustomed to voting every August and November, every year, and turnout likely will increase over time as the predictably of elections

The climate feels like it is favoring a move to even years--the Senate Bill certainly looks that way and the Senate committee chair, Mitch Holmes, is well-respected and has worked hard to be extremely inclusive in the development of the bill.

If it passes, costs will be higher. We will need more full-time staff, and have provided that information to the committee.

But that's it. We'll manage, regardless of where this all falls. Elections will be conducted, again, just at higher cost.

I expect a lot of emotion and energy expended in the coming month on the move of elections.

Why?

If the current April election turnout--usually more than 10 percent and less than 20 percent, is acceptable to policymakers, then it makes no sense for any legislative action.

If the turnout is desired to be higher, the next question should be, "how high?" After all, when the Presidential Commission on Election Administration was formed following long lines at some polling places in the 2012 presidential election, Commission members often asked, "What is an acceptable line?"

So, if turnout isn't high enough in April, what is the acceptable turnout? No one has really quantified that here.

That quantification should drive the solution.

However, absent that, it's been demonstrated that elections outside of the April cycle--by mail or in the fall--have better turnout, so it's hard to argue that moving elections is bad. Where to seems the item up for debate.

But that's not the discussion, so it's further difficult to have a constructive talk about the fall of odd years vs. the fall of even years because much of the debate is centering on the move at all or the composition of the elections--specifically if local races should be partisan.

Frankly, my view is that if that's the reason for the bill, then the elections should stay in April until turnout objectives are developed.

I've been a part of many discussions over the years related to moving elections. The local race partisan aspect does come up occasionally, but almost always by observers rather than those involved in the legislation. The Senate Bill clearly speaks to partisan, but it's an entire all-but-the-kitchen sink bill and may bury under its own weight.

What may be left is the move of elections, to odd or even years.

Either is fine. Odd is better. Even will cost more.

We'll handle it either way.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-17017790192911800992015-02-01T13:09:00.002-08:002015-02-01T13:09:59.047-08:00Track and FieldThe Super Bowl is just hours away and a few hours from that, 9 a.m. tomorrow, the wrap-up will begin to our Super Bowl of elections--five school district mail-ballot elections on January 27.

That January 27 was a day.

The election closed at noon, as ballots were being dropped off in person at the rate of 3 a minute.

Also at noon, the candidate filing deadline for the spring election. With the deadline passed, about one-third of the county's voters have will be eligible for the spring primary on March 3.

We have a mayorial primary in Shawnee, two city council primaries in Roeland Park, and an Olathe School District primary.

We've had 5 mail-ballot elections on the same day (just now, but also 3 on the same day before), we've had different types of elections at the polls on the same day (primary in one city, recall in another), and we've had two different types of elections on the same day (mail-ballot ending at noon on the same day as a polls election ending at 7).

But we've never had the finish line tape crossed in one election at the same time the starter pistol was going for another. That made Tuesday feel like an election office track meet.

Some in our office were gathering the last ballots dropped; others were assessing which races might require primaries, polling places, election worker needs, and ballot plans.

It gave new meaning to continuing with an active election.

Ten years ago last month, I came to the Johnson County Election Office, and we have had an active election every moment in those 10 years.

How do I term an active election? Well, one we are actively working on is the simplest way.

But the definition is more narrow.

For instance, we're thinking about the 2016 presidential election, but that's not an active election.

We're working on the spring primary--that's active.

It will be followed by the spring general--that's active.

The next election isn't scheduled until the winter of 2016. The election isn't set, with candidates and questions, so that election isn't active.

And what that means is that fate is teasing us--the streak may come to an end in mid-April as we wrap up the spring canvass.

It's a bit of way to have an answer to the "what do you do the other 363 days of the year?" or "is that a full-time job?"

Back to the Super Bowl--I'm pretty sure the NFL event personnel work full-time for this once-a-year game.

Elections are no different.

We're event planners, after all. That, and logistics managers.

So, when I mention this active election streak, it means one thing to me and it means something else to those who were working at our office before I came. As far as I can tell, the actual active election streak is about 14 years.

Tomorrow's canvass day--Groundhog Day, ironically--for the mail-ballot elections will mean closure to those five elections. We're already working on election number six and seven.

It's unlikely that we will go the rest of 2015 without a special election.

For instance, in 2013, the day after the spring election, I received a call from a city to schedule a mail-ballot election.

Nobody here is hoping for such a call this April. We'd be fine with that streak ending. We have more than enough pent-up work.

After all, advance voting for our real Super Bowl begins in just 21 months.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-63956175314320608352015-01-25T12:08:00.000-08:002015-01-25T12:14:23.023-08:00School Elections Near the Finish LineWe're 48 hours from the close of the five school mail-ballot elections, collectively the largest mail-ballot effort we've ever had and the largest number of paper ballots ever processed in Johnson County.

And yet, I'm in the office and it's empty, calm.

I did not see this coming. I thought today we'd have a full crew in, buried, wondering what kind of reinforcements we needed.

Our crew left yesterday fully caught up, although we expect an onslaught in the mail tomorrow and many drop-offs Tuesday morning.

So, we don't know when we will have unofficial final results, but it's feeling more like it will be Tuesday, at some point, rather than Wednesday or later.

I could say the reason is our preparation. That's definitely fair--we thought we were ready, but we weren't sure. We had about 50 part-time workers, in different stages, different roles, different rooms.

I could say the reason was the decision to utilize a new high-speed scanner, the first ever of its type used in Kansas and one of the first times this model has been used in the country. It was a big risk--going straight to a live election without staff training through a smaller or test election--but it has gone very smoothly.

I could say the reason is the dedicated hard work from all of our part-time employees. That's definitely true. It's very gratifying to see so many people here, working hard and getting paid very little, but caring so much for our voters.

Another factor, though, is that voters aren't voting.

We're at 95,267 ballots returned right now, about 29 percent of the 332,237 ballots issued.

I expected closer to 50 percent returned. Likely, the final number will be less than 40 percent.

Mail for Santa in Miracle on 34th Street. We expect
a similar picture, in living color, Tuesday.

As I like to say, there's a lot of baseball left to be played. We might experience, for instance, a Miracle on 34th Street experience where the post office brings in tray after tray after tray of ballots on Tuesday.

As I type, cars are coming in at the rate of one per minute to drop off ballots. That will become intense tomorrow and Tuesday.

Still, 40 percent turnout. That's like, to paraphrase Nuke LaLoosh, lower than 50 percent.

That's probably all that means.

I don't know that the turnout leads to any conclusions. We did have a lot of undeliverable ballots (people move, you know) and the turnout is pretty consistent among all 5 districts.

Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission are both at 30 percent, De Soto is at 33 percent, and Olathe and Gardner-Edgerton are both at 26 percent. Perhaps there is a difference in the communications efforts within the districts, but the number of voters and even the type of voter (apartment vs. home owner, school family vs. non-school) are probably the main factors.

An interesting Big Data project would be to compare all of those factors after the election is over. While interesting, it simply may be just that. I'm not sure how actionable the data would be. There may be learnings political campaigns in these areas can gather for future races.

Our actionable list was very specific--job one was to get the job done. We're well on our way.

Expect photos and an update on Election Day.

Or is that spring election filing deadline day?

Why, yes, it's the same day, the same time.

These elections close at noon on Tuesday, precisely the same time and date we will know the extent of our March primary election.

We already know we have a primary for Shawnee mayor. That whole update, likely, will be Wednesday.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-7977839077645369502015-01-16T14:15:00.000-08:002015-01-16T14:15:17.701-08:00School Mail-Ballot UpdateMany learnings, very busy as we're working on the 5 mail-ballot elections that culminate on January 27.

Our entire building is abuzz with people working on this election. We've hired about 50 part-timers, nestled throughout the office. Every room is an election room.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in this busy time, what's a thousand pictures worth?

Or, at least a few, below.

More, for reals, soon.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-36196310418685973422015-01-07T04:30:00.001-08:002015-01-07T04:30:23.590-08:00Now With PhotosBallots are hitting the mail in our mega-mail ballot election.

Here are various photos from the mail processing site, a pit stop between the printer and the post office.

We had them late last week, did some spot checking (just to make sure the right school's ballot is in the right, different-colored envelope), and got a sense of what 330,000 ballots looks like.

We had some issues with envelopes sticking together, but that seems to be worked out.

Outgoing postage was a little less than $100,000.

In the meantime, we're ramping up, converting meeting rooms into mail-processing rooms, making sure all of computers and hand-scanners work, and are ready--as much as possible--for the storm ahead.

Thinking of storm ahead, while it's cold in Kansas City today, in the "didn't come up with that worry until we got here" world, our whole concern with weather leading up to today was if a snowstorm would impact delivery of the ballots from Alabama to us.

Yesterday, and why it didn't cross my mind until yesterday I don't know, I realized a new crippling situation would be a massive snowstorm that keeps our special board from the office for a day or two. That would put us 30,000 ballots behind faster than you could catch a snowflake on your tongue.

It's always something.

Here are the photos, below. We'll have photos of our first batch of incoming, as well as, I expect, about 10,000 undeliverables, address changes, even though we just had a mass mailing to all voters in October.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-6721087511812471872015-01-01T16:35:00.000-08:002015-01-01T16:35:33.768-08:00Dropping Out of SocietyI'm 10 days from being Johnson County Election Commissioner for 10 years, and in less than 7 days, we begin the most monumental thing our office has experienced in that time.

On Wednesday, we will mail out more than 330,000 ballots to voters in five of the county's six school districts.

The significance is not just the amount of paper and volume we're facing, but also that this is a steep mountain of paperwork, hitting us at a 90 degree angle and an equally fast drop-off after February.

That's an unusual way of saying, "We'll never see another like this."

So, what does that mean? It means that if this were the new normal, where we moved to all mail elections for instance, we'd scale our operations in a way to permanently handle the volume. This wouldn't be an egg going through a snake's body, but bunnies, constantly nibbling and sweetly multiplying.

I would have never considered our current stressed-out environment conjured up images of bunnies (or unicorns or rainbows), but fact is, we've historically proven we can handle a certain volume of transactions, and the number of registrations and voters reasonably increases over time.

We would have time to request and budget additional resources.

If we moved to all-mail ballots, we'd have this big ramp up, but then, with each election, we'd only be dealing with the incremental changes. January would be tough, but in a short-term-pain, long-term gain kind of way. By the time we carried this new normal into 2016, if that's where we were headed, we'd have manageable routines.

Here, we've taken on this big meal and are trying to process it through our existing structure. We have to do it this way because after the election, we're back to the processes we already have, with a spring primary already ensured for early March and then a countywide election at the polls in April.

The fact that we're having these elections in between November and April is news enough--we've never had this, this fast, this large. In fact, election day is also the filing deadline--when we know how large the March primary is. Talk about transitions:

Election ends at noon. Filing deadline is at noon. The finish line for one and starting line for another is the same line.

So, how to deal: first off, we're on lock-down.

I've already informed our staff that days out of the office require two levels of approval a week in advance and my administrative assistant has shut down all meeting scheduling until April 15.

I'm dropping out of society, much the way new parents do when having a newborn (and, I've often here compared elections to babies--babies are cuter, but bunnies are cute, too).

We are utilizing an ES&S high-speed scanner for ballot scanning--the first in Kansas and one of the first times in the country--and we're being trained on next week. By the time we are experts with, we will flex back to normal size, essentially putting the scanner on the shelf until another large mail-ballot election.

It's not uncommon for us to have mail-ballot elections for 80 or 90,000 voters--just never for 330,000.

We're bringing in a special board of about 40 employees, who will work 6-day weeks. We're not sure if that is enough, and we'll assess that a week into this.

We're expecting an average of 10,000 ballots returned per day, but that's an average, and there is a postal holiday involved, too. We could very well find ourselves trying to swallow an influx of 30,000 ballots on a particular day.

That's a lot of scanning, but that's even more blocking and tackling--opening envelopes, checking EVERY signature, entering the voter into our registration system.

For that, we're using every computer and every work station in every crevice of the building.

That may not be enough.

We may have to hire temporary agency employees and work two shifts, but we'll see.

In the end, we're taking a structure that is used to handling 50,000 pieces of returned mail, tops, and flexing it 6 times. I'm not even sure Stretch Armstrong flexes that far.

There is a fair likelihood we may not have final results on election day (the election ends at noon). If we have a big mail push that day and our special board is weary heading into the evening, they'll come back and finish the next day.

We might even assess providing results district-by-district, where only one or two might be waiting a day for unofficial results, but that may not be possible with the scanner. For instance, in running Gardner's results, we might get exposure to interim results for another district, and that would be unacceptable.

Blogging will be impacted. Everything will be impacted. If nothing else, I'll be posting photos.

Tomorrow, a group of employees are going to the Pitney Bowes facility to watch them load up the envelopes. We'll have photos from that.Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-55186747364487482022014-12-21T09:23:00.001-08:002014-12-22T06:30:03.095-08:00Two Words, Many ViewsKing Louie.

Few short phrases conjure quick thoughts in Johnson County like King Louie, particularly these days.

In Kansas City in 1980s and 1990s, King Louie Lanes were all over town, and one very large megacenter, with an ice rink and billiards, was in the heart of Johnson County.

To many long-time Johnson Countians, "King Louie" is a phrase that immediately recalls an image of this center. ABC's Wide World of Sports, when that was a thing, broadcast national bowling tournaments--when those were things--from King Louie's Metcalf location, when that was a thing.

Yet, King Louie isn't much of a thing these days to most Johnson Countians.

Among those most wired with Johnson County politics, that phrase creates an instant reaction. The county purchased this site a few years ago on about as much of a lark as a $3 million investment can be.

Take away the few dozen most wired with Johnson County politics, that phrase, though, likely just brings up some sentiment of moment spent there, often from a high-school party.

I see that phrase and I always think, "The Jungle Book." Then, again, that's what I thought any time I passed a King Louie facility in the 1980s and 1990s.

Point is, the King Louie property is hyperly tuned into some because of the recent purchase, but the average Johnson Countian internalizes "King Louie" more than considers what the county is doing with this facility.

Yet, this property, since its purchase, has sat in limbo--the initial vision wasn't grounded enough to allow it come to fruition and yet repurposing the building requires investment that, to some, seems like throwing good money after bad.

The Election Office has been marginally conjoined with this property. Possibly, this facility may be able to be used as one of the county's advance voting locations, but I first became aware that this was a reason for the purchase of the property about two hours before the concept was presented to the Board of County Commissioners a few years ago.

This past Thursday, the Board reviewed a very impressive, well-coordinated pitch on a new view of the center's future. The total cost of plan, counting the earlier investment, is about $22 million.

Personally, if the County feels this facility meets needs and it has the money, I am extremely neutral to the whole idea. I'm never jealous for others achieving their dreams; I just want to achieve mine, too.

My dreams are pretty basic and linked to 2016, mostly.

Speaking of 2016--looking at the turnout from the 2008 presidential election (79 percent) and the number of polling places (284 compared to 182 this past November), and considering the potential for historical firsts if candidates in both parties become the eventual presidential nominees, our cost for the presidential election will be at least $2 million more than the 2014 election.

This isn't from discretionary spending. It's akin to "keeping the lights on," a phrase often used by our budget office and the county manager.

We will need at least 100 more polling places, and there's nothing to suggest we can find that many.

We will then need more advance voting sites, and there's nothing to suggest that's possible. At the very least, we will be paying much more rent for advance sites than we did in 2008. Our election workers will need to have their training costs at least adjusted for minimum wage and they really could use a raise--they haven't had one since 2006. Postage is likely to increase.

The Non-Jungle Book Version of King Louie

Still, the hard-wired, non-negotiable cost increase will be at least $2 million. Other operational needs--headcount to avoid the kind of crisis we experienced with a death in the office right at a critical time--are more negotiable. They're real, but more discretionary.

Those $2 million costs don't seem to be on anyone's radar so I'm telling everyone I can at every chance I can. (Yes, Dear Reader, you are inside the Looking Glass at this very moment).

As long as this property doesn't get in the way of elections, such a basic--the basic--piece of government, who am I to complain?

Still, of the $2 million "keep the lights on," amount, King Louie has the chance to mitigate just $25,000 IF we can use the facility for the August and November elections.

We use the same locations for both elections, so King Louie is of no use to us in November 2016 if it isn't available until July for us to set up for August. Otherwise, our first time there will be August 2018.

This represents my rub with this issue. A savings of $25,000 every other year, in today's dollars, as providing one advance voting location--not all advance voting, but one of at least 4 sites--is relatively small in terms of the total project costs. Yet, advance voting is listed as a primary reason for investing in the facility.

It's not lost on me that while there was an orchestrated presentation to the Board, I wasn't asked to be part of this pitch. Hopefully, others noticed that as well.

The need, though, to have it sooner so we can use the facility in 2016 was well-represented by the county's Bureau Chief. Two of the Commissioners did bring up my concern in the meeting, and I talked with another before the meeting.

I think that everyone involved is on board with my 2016 concerns. And, full circle, if we get the advance voting facility, that will be a nice thing. It's not an advance voting panacea. But, one less thing, that's for sure.

We spend a lot of cycles trying to negotiate advance voting sites.

We may be at place very soon where we have 10 advance voting locations because we we are losing polling place locations faster than we are getting new one. Having one good-sized advance voting site in the can will never be bad.

In that regard, as my version of King Louie would say, "I'm tired of monkeying around." There will be less of that if we have this facility.

(Click here to the link to the meeting--in that link is a link for the presentation, worth downloading and reviewing).

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-18529916222618347842014-12-15T04:58:00.001-08:002014-12-15T05:06:10.640-08:00Anytime But AprilSometimes, it takes a small election for a large a-ha moment.

Such was the case Tuesday, where Roeland Park picked a new city council member after a resignation.

Roeland Park is the only Johnson County jurisdiction that doesn't appoint replacements on its council. This was the second special election in Roeland Park in 2014.

Like the previous special elections, it was a one-ward, one polling place election.

The election also wrapped by my first 10 years of elections as election commissioner. We've had 60 elections, but only 20 of them were planned.

Averaging 6 a year, we already have 5 special elections planned for January 27--five different school districts will be having mail-ballot elections on the same day.

This election came during a busy week, as I also needed to prepare for a presentation to a Kansas House and Senate Committee on Friday. This committee is looking at data related to the potential of moving spring elections to the fall, either in even or odd years.

I've been advocating moving the elections to the fall of odd years. I've discussed the reasons before, but, summed up, I believe turnout may increase and I also think it could be done in conjunction with requiring schools to have a student-holiday on election days to allow consistent use of schools as polling places.

So, the preparation of that presentation was on my mind on Tuesday as we waited to see the turnout--more than 20 percent, as it, well, turned out.

Hmmm. That's a higher turnout than spring elections (that include Roeland Park).

We got to thinking. The turnouts for special elections usually are higher than we expect, at least at the polls. Mail-ballot election turnout has been dropping over time, but the turnout still is very good.

We put it all on a slide, below, and note with the red arrows the lowest turnout of any special elections. The green arrow shows the highest turnout of the last four April elections.

The lowest turnout of a special election is still higher than the best turnout in April.

We've read criticisms of the idea of moving spring elections that there is no data to suggest turnout might increase if elections were moved from April to November.

That's true. But this data supports that elections held any time BUT April have a higher turnout.

It's fascinating, really, because the quick follow-up question is why?

It could be that these elections stand on their own, and get individual attention, even individual outreach attention on the mail-ballot side. The why is worth exploring, but the data is fairly conclusive that April turnouts are the low achievers in the crowd.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-77132495989039106962014-12-10T17:15:00.000-08:002014-12-10T17:15:45.315-08:00New Normal, With a Short FuseI haven't really intended to take the month of December off so far, but such is the paradox of this blog.

It's intended to give a behind-the-scenes view of our elections, yet, as elections heat up, it's harder and harder to update.

There's much to update but this will just stick with what's continuing to be the greatest election story ever told her--the school district's mail-ballot elections scheduled for January 27.

What's important here, and we're learning this more and more each day, is the scale ahead of us.

Checking in an average of 10,000 envelopes a day requires a lot of computers, hand-held scanners, and authentication tokens into our statewide voter registration system for signature verification. The scope of that is becoming more real to us as we devilishly hop into the details.

We processed about the same the number of returned paper ballots in 2004's presidential election that we will handled this year, but most of those ballots were in-person ballots, not requiring signature verification.

We've been so focused on the scanning of 165,000 returned ballots, we realized we haven't spent enough time on the "checking in" consideration, and even simple things like, "Do we have enough tables and chairs?" and "Are our envelope openers up to the task?" need to be explored.

There's some sort of business correlation here in that we are addressing the need to scale fast. If this was the new normal, we'd make decisions to plan for that--automated signature verification systems, for instance.

But this isn't the new normal. It's a spontaneous breakout--like the first time you see "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in a theater and people run out to the aisles to do the Time Warp, only to come back and sit next to you.

Before we can pick up our jaws from January and ask, "What just happened?" we'll be back in the typical world of our polls elections.

Everything we know is wrong, but just for about 60 days. That's our new normal.

It's the Temporary New Normal.

As Roeland Park's election concluded yesterday, the reality is, the Temporary New Normal is full-on.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-18163436283656178192014-11-30T05:24:00.000-08:002014-11-30T11:16:00.642-08:00Paper, Party of 330,000?Somewhere, there will be an election administrator in a jurisdiction using paper ballots who will read this post and consider our plight child's play.

But, here we are, short-staffed and run down following the November election and in the middle of a much smaller December election in Roeland Park.

Yet, a monster set of elections await us, with ballots going out the first week of January to about 330,000 voters in five of the six school districts in Johnson County.

If half come back, we will be processing 165,000 pieces of paper, plus the envelopes, in roughly 16 days.

That's more than 10,000 ballots returned daily, and each one of the envelopes has to be checked into our voter registration system and have the returning signature matched against the voter's record.

Then, the ballots have to be scanned and tabulated. Never having paper at the polls, at least in the last 50 years, we operate with a handful of scanners at our office.

At most, these scanners can scan 1,000 ballots an hour, but a likely throughput for the four we have is really about 2,500 an hour.

We've never processed this many paper ballots before. Our office used paper ballots for advance voting in the presidential election of 2004, with a two-page ballot, and that resulted in nearly 200,000 pieces of paper.

That was just before I came to this job and I still hear horror tales from that process.

Job One here is to, well, get the job done. We've never pulled something like this off before, and the fact that it falls right between two countywide elections (spring is comin') makes this even rougher.

In fact, the election itself ends the day after the spring election filing deadline.

Job Two is to get the job done as economically as possible. Incremental costs are passed on to the school districts, while fixed costs--such as staffing and equipment purchases--are borne by the county.

So, that creates two problems for us--at least two phases of one problem and another problem, actually.

The first problem is, how many part-time election workers do we appoint to handle the load? Part-time is likely the wrong phrase--temporary, full-time workers. We probably could use at least 75. In November we had 12.

We only have 20 stations for envelope check-in. We'll pretty much be needing someone sitting at those stations the entire time.

Each signature on the return envelopes must be verified.

Could we even get 75 people? What if we needed more? Where would they work, securely?

Can we get by with fewer, and how?

If only we had one of those fancy high-speed scanners that's being touted with some of the next-generation voting systems. Our system isn't compatible with such a thing but if the system was, we could scan much, much faster--10,000 in just a couple of hours.

Or....

Somewhere in the Royals' World Series euphoria, we decided to take a major leap here, using an entirely new voting system for this election. It's akin to buying a big-screen television just before the Super Bowl.

This isn't the major leap it could be, in that we aren't going to have any election at the polls, but we are going to set up the election and operate it with a new tabulation system. The system will use a high-speed scanner.

Election administrators don't roll like this. Where's the mock election? What are we doing for redundancy? These are typical, internal questions.

Our equipment vendor, to the redundancy point, is a four-hour drive away. If the system can't be warrantied to be fail-safe for the first 20 days of its life, there's an issue there, anyway. If the system explodes, I'm sure we will have another one within a half-day.

The system has been certified federally and in Kansas, so that's not a risk. It's just that we're making this huge transition in December for an election that will be over on Groundhog Day, the day of the elections' canvasses.

Unlike the movie, the day after Groundhog Day, and every day after, will not be the same.

Once this election is over, we'll have a high-speed taste test, an understanding of a new system that we will evaluate for our ultimate equipment replacement, and a very large paperweight until our next large mail-ballot election, likely in late 2015 or later. It's not quite a throwaway unit, but close.

The big question is the reconciliation between the scanner costs and the savings of people. That's roughly going to be a wash. Remember, though, Job One is to do the job.

And this job requires that we not bring a rinky-dink scanning system to high-speed scanner fight.

So, the battle begins. We hope to have the unit on-site this week to begin preparations.

It's funny--that Super Bowl comparison: in November elections, the media likes to ask us is if this is our big moment, our Super Bowl.

I'm sure, given all we have going on, our staff would much rather not have this behemoth group of elections in January. But, we've never done something like this before, and in February, conducting the canvass they day after the NFL's Big Game, we're going to feel pretty good about what we accomplished.

That sounds like a Super Bowl party to me.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-5079393030959425592014-11-20T18:49:00.000-08:002014-11-22T08:57:10.275-08:00Roeland Park, Part TwoAlthough it's been terribly long between posts, have pity, please--we started another election yesterday.

It's a special election in Roeland Park, second time this year, and comes in the most intense election period in Johnson County history. With the November election just ending, we have this election a month later, and, on January 7, we will be mailing about 350,000 ballots for special school elections.

That election day will be about a week after the filing deadline for the spring elections. Come April, nearly every voter in Johnson County will have had 3 elections in five months and some may have five elections in five months if we have a spring primary.

(Was that as crazy to read as it was to type? One of our ballot envelope colors should be camouflage, to recognize ballot fatigue.)

Amidst all of this, we have some major budget deadlines ahead. These are important because it may be 2014, but the 2016 budget gains form by March. As mentioned in the last post, we have a lot of work to do to prepare for 2016, and the costs for that election will be much higher than in 2014.

Further, we must work on preparing our voting system request for proposal. We were chagrined recently to learn that Sedgwick County has $4.5 million set aside for a new system. (Actually, I'm chagrined for us but happy for them).

Douglas County had the wisdom to hire a county management leader from Johnson County a few years ago, but she took with her, apparently, the resolve to plan ahead. Douglas County began setting aside money each year for voting systems at the same time our county manager stopped our annual set-aside amount and also pulled funding based on a quote we received, provided several times in the budget process. We had $10 million at one time in the capital budget, but he pulled it.

Shawnee County, also, has set aside a large portion of money for its next system.

So, it's frustrating to say the least when my predecessor had the wisdom to push for and implement a plan to pay for a future system, but we are behind the other large counties in preparation years later.

This will have a major point of reckoning because even when the county issues debt to pay for the new system, it will have either a tax impact or a major cost cutting impact. That cost cutting won't come in elections, because as we ramp up polling places and staff advance voting to 2016 levels, I estimate those additional costs to be more than $1 million from 2014.

Plus, because we will have to finance our new system, this issue also likely prevents the county from setting aside money for its next, next system. This has created a perpetual election funding crisis.

And that's if things stay the way they are now. Our voting machines tabulate perfectly, but reports of a vote flipping from one candidate to another--something the system has had since it was implemented in 2002--does wear us down. Particularly, social media can turn one report into a viral epidemic.

I often talked to three or four people about the same report, and we just don't have the staff size to talk about these issues adequately, let alone address them. It's worth considering if we need to purchase an interim solution for 2016 while we select a longer-term solution.

All of this reminds me of how, when I first came to the office 10 years ago, how the industry quaked of reports on the Black Box Voting. There was a book of the same name. 10 years ago, that's what viral meant.

Those were the days.

Still, we're presented with an opportunity, really. Many voters want paper, others want better touch screens, and I want a system that is easier to maintain. Age is a relentless beast, for humans and machines, and the clock is ticking on the useful life of our system.

Legislators know this. I just spoke at a conference of staffers put on by the National Council of State Legislators. Two of those staffers were from Kansas, and they are coordinating an a task force of legislators looking at combining spring and fall elections.

I'm attending the meeting tomorrow, and speaking next month. My patter is familiar--spring elections in odd years move to fall in odd years, leaving each year with August and November elections. In conjunction with this, require that all schools be closed on election day in November and available as polling places.

One thing that has struck me, since the Black Box Voting days, is that, well, viral campaigns reach a lot of people. We all vote, and many of us have opinions on the best way to vote (paper, machine, Internet, you name it).

There isn't much consensus on the best method, today or tomorrow. Add in layers of policy makers, who have their own opinions and their own cost and social drivers and restrainers, and the chance of a common approach in the country, or even in a state, seems unlikely.

I'm still a believer that there will be a big bang, a disruptive moment in the industry--perhaps a single state legislature will pass a little bill requiring Internet Voting, or emailing of ballots. All the work of standards, scientists' theories, and activist interests will go out the window.

Likewise, the opinions of election administrators will matter little in such a scenario. Somewhere, we have to find a way to make the realities of today merge to lead to a solution. My little presentation included here is hard to follow unless you were at the meeting this week (and even then....), but I'd be glad to explain it further if you email or comment.

For now, back to the elections.

 Voting Equipment Considerations  from briandnewby
Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-60571910295462455862014-11-11T09:58:00.001-08:002014-11-12T03:51:04.264-08:00Election MarathonI ran a half-marathon on Sunday.

Half-Marathon Finisher Medal

I ran it because I could, a great release from what has been a grueling marathon of an election. I hadn't trained, but I was okay with my time of 1:55 and finishing it was the win, anyway.

That real marathon ends today, with the board of canvassers reconvening at 1:30. With about 3,000 provisional ballots to count and many having to be hand-counted partials, the special board worked 12 hours yesterday to finalize results.

That's a marathon in its own right. These are some of our office's most dedicated part-timers, working for nearly nothing, pushing paper.

Even years bring with them many things, including a very long ballot, two-sided, 8 1/2 by 17 inches, with approximately 30 items to select. With 190,000 voters, that's nearly 6 million voting transactions.

Even years also bring a long October, one which doesn't allow for training for such things as real marathons. I ran my only marathon in 2013. I'm not sure I'll run another, but I knew I wouldn't run one in 2014. Besides, we had election worker training the day of the Kansas City Marathon.

Election Results, Halfway From Finishing, on CNN

We had our own virtual marathon at the office, though. In fact, all of Kansas City had the World Series run for the Royals that was exhausting, and we didn't even play the games. The post-season ran the entire month of October and held the city captive. Who knew October baseball really now lasts all of October?

It hasn't always been that way.

Baseball great Reggie Jackson referred to himself as Mr. October and as a kid, I thought that was a silly nickname because the World Series ended halfway through the month. I ran a half-marathon, but I'm not Mr. Marathon. Why wasn't he Mr. Half-October? Or, Mr. Late Summer? Or, Mr. 30-Days-Some-In-September-Some-In-October?

Anyway, there definitely was a Royals factor to the whole election. In training, I began giving the milestones in Royals dates--registration ended as the Royals won game 3 of the division series, advance by mail began the day they clinched that series and--oops--Supervising Judges pick up supplies the day of the victory parade (my guess on the date).

We saw advance voting in person trail off in the afternoon of game days and explode after the World Series ended. Voters were giddy. People were dressed in blue but if their voting experience was blue, we didn't know it.

After the Series, those things we typically see when voting is going on for two weeks began emerging. Voters selected candidate A on a machine, for instance, but candidate B came up. They changed it, voted accurately, but worried about all of the others who may not be as observant as them.

This has gone on since the machines were purchased, 2002--before my time, and as much as I'd like to use this as THE excuse for needing a new voting system (oh, it's an excuse, believe me), it usually happens because of pilot error. The machines are not your father's iPads, which then just tells you how old the technology is if your father didn't even use it.

To provide some context there, the scroll bars on the review screen on the voting machines are on the LEFT. Look at your web browser. Note the scrolls are on the right--always have been. Yep, we're voting with pre-Internet design.

In any event, we record whenever these anomalies are reported, and in this election it seemed to happen, as it usually does in an election, on just once race. We had a couple of reports for governor and Secretary of State, and one on a judge, but the other 25 were on the US Senate race.

Again, I have absolutely no incentive to defend the machines, other than that I can demonstrate our testing that assures they tabulate perfectly. I didn't select the machines, I want a new system, and I have no problem throwing the machines under the bus, except that the machines would probably cause the bus to crash, and while unlikely around here, someone might be on a bus and be hurt. That would be bad.

But if it was a simple case of bad calibration, many of the races would have this issue. At the very least, the races in the same place on the screen, as voters advance, would experience the same thing, on screen two, screen three, and screen four. 30 reports out of nearly 6 million transactions don't lead to a widespread diagnosis of poor calibration.

The reports and calls suggest we equally were favoring candidates, not only suggesting that we were trying to engineer the election but also that those Palm Pilot devices had the capability of guessing who the voter wanted in a race and then forcing the other candidate's name to be selected.

I heard about these reports, often the same report from different sources, through many poll agents and lawyers. I talked to only two angry voters on election day, mostly because I was on the phone with other stakeholders the rest of the day. We had media throughout the day, and with a position that had gone a year to fill not yet filled until yesterday (woo hoo!) and the sad loss of our assistant election commissioner over election workers and polling places, being understaffed took its toll in terms of my availability on election day.

I was so excited to talk to these actual voters that they probably wondered if they were being punk'd.

We had some key learnings in this election:

We have consolidated polling places for the last time. We had the fewest, 182, we've had in a November election and in 2016, we'll need at least 75 more.

We won't get to 250 polling places, let alone 284 that we had in 2008. They just won't be available.

We will need more advance sites.

We won't get those either, with the economy improving and storefronts filling, without paying excessive rent.

My reaction to these issues is, "So?" These are elections. These are real cost issues, including staffing needs and election worker pay increases that are needed. My job is to administer the elections and the county's role, very harshly, is to fund it. I expect the 2016 cost to be at least $1 million more than it was this year, at least. This is not my problem. It is a problem, for sure, only to get worse with the funding of our voting system. But there is a huge expense ahead to be adequately prepared for 2016.

And, finally, we had the learning of the poll agents--about 400 deployed in this election.

Imagine, instead, if just half of them had been election workers. We'd have had one more worker per polling place and then some.

Now, back to running the half-marathon. I like running races and I pay for that. Similarly, I played indoor soccer for years. I like participating in competitive events.

As a competitor, I've had my share of times that I felt, for instance, that the soccer referees could have been better. But the idea of becoming a referee myself--no thank you. Just, I thought, I wish that they would hire better referees.

Likewise, I think voters deserve to carry expectations that their participation in competitive government events (elections) are handled professionally. Voters pay entry fees (taxes) to have voting convenient, and never would I suggest to a voter who is unhappy that if the voter really cared, the voter should get more involved in the process, to be one of our referees.

But I would make such an appeal to poll agents. In fact, I plan to do that very thing. One area we will target, for new workers, will be the poll agents.

If someone has made the leap to assist with a campaign or candidate, and had time on election day to monitor the process, the best way they could help the process is to be part of it, as an election worker.

We're fortunate that these 400 were engaged. Now, we hope to engage them further for the marathon ahead in 2016.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-28286426131270848522014-11-02T18:12:00.000-08:002014-11-02T18:24:23.612-08:00#CNNAs always, there is much more to update that time allows, but as we head into the last day before the election, at the very least, I wanted to make sure I quickly blogged about some sort of life imitating life event.

I'm not sure art is involved in this case, except for shirt art. I'll explain:

Any doubt that Kansas is in the public eye on Tuesday was erased when we received a call on October 15 that CNN would be broadcasting live from our office on Tuesday.

Politico, the Washington Post, and Time magazine also will have reporters here, although the Time thing is a bit misleading. David Von Drehle of Time lives here locally and I only know that because I sold a universal weight set a few years back and he bought it. Again, just another part of my get-to-know-all-380,000-voters plan. Still, I may see him professionally this week, too.

CNN will be arriving tomorrow to set up and we'll discuss their time here. I think they'll mostly be doing a behind the scenes view of the election and, of course, that's right in the wheelhouse of this blog.

A local reporter asked if we would do anything differently with CNN coming.

I told her we'll dress better.

In fact, we always give our high-school election workers a t-shirt to wear at the polls so they can be properly identified and applauded by every voter they encounter.

We also use a group of Olathe North National Honor Society students to help with the check-in of equipment on election night. They will wear the same shirts.

The back of the shirt features a hashtag, #GoVoteJoco.

We've given birth to it, hoping it lives as long as hashtags live. We thought about a QR code, but QR codes are so 2012. The front of the shirt has 2014 on it, so we only need the hashtag community to hold on for two months.

#hashtagsforever

Also in the world of fashion, I show you a pin we give to each election worker:

We customize one for each November election and our workers proudly collect them. In fact, in my international observation trip to Georgia last year, I took some pins from the 2010 and 2012 election and they were a huge hit with my fellow observers from around the world.

I was a little surprised. I'm not much of a Pin Man, I guess. But many of my peers proudly wore the pins.

So, surprised, yes. But, also proud.

I'm further proud of our workers. They are galvanizing for the election in the wake of losing the man who, often, hired them--Tom Ray.

I asked that they offer up the 2014 election as a prayer to Tom as we conducted supervising judge training this weekend.

For training, we broke out the interactive test-taking clickers we bought in 2012 to do polling and testing during training. I find that asking questions before training is most effective because we see areas we need to emphasize if the group scores low on a particular item.

Besides, it's really deflating to do the questions at the end of training, only to realize we still have much work to do.

I know the question here was a bit of a creme-puff, but I've never had a group answer 100 percent correctly before!

And with that, I'll stop the post and take the win.

#TilTuesdayElection Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-57282321336548074802014-10-23T15:27:00.000-07:002014-10-23T15:50:14.731-07:00The Image of The Year of the VoterBlog posts shouldn't be painful to write, but this one is.

I've often said that we are one poorly timed illness from a crisis because we are desperately understaffed and our employees each have monster jobs with many responsibilities.

Depending on where we are in the election cycle, from mapping to training to voting machine delivery, the entire election can grind down if we lose a player in the chain.

We lost a player in the chain today, someone who values family so much that a "player in the chain" is how I think he would want to be remembered.

Our assistant election commissioner over polling places and election workers, Tom Ray, was surprisingly diagnosed with lung cancer in May. He left us just five months later.

This is a post that deserves to be incredibly long, filled with nearly daily anecdotes I could share with how much he meant to me, our office, our election workers, and our voters.

Yet, it's been so sudden, and there are so many people working here, and they all need to know. The election can't stop, and that's the backdrop behind Tom's passing. As we're internalizing the news, candidates are calling, voters are here, we continue to take request for advance ballots, and we listen to complaints.

I just took a call from a voter who thought that giving the address to our advance site at 9800 Metcalf was too vague, that no one could find it. She felt this was voter suppression, as if seeking out a facility for advance voting, signing the lease, equipping it, and staffing it was a total ruse to keep people from voting.

It's also ironic that I took that call while typing this because Tom was a champion for advance voting, and he negotiated the lease for this location. We wrapped up the lease just days before he found out his condition was incredibly serious.

If you found that you had a terminal disease and would die within a year, you might quit your job, pull out your savings, and live on an island. Yet, that island might not be paradise, but rather a daily reminder of the forthcoming end.

For Tom, making sure he left us as prepared as possible for November was his outlet. He came in every day until his treatment amped up. His hours here were dropping to just a couple a day.

We've been scrambling to move ahead with scheduling and assigning workers, and without question, some workers have fallen through the cracks. We've been pushing workers into training without yet finalizing their assignment so we don't lose them, yet having 200 floaters to get to the right location sets us for a crazy week next week.

There's so much Tom knows.

Sadly, I just left that sentence as I typed it so you see where my head is. There's so much Tom knew, actually. We will have a pretty good idea of those things we didn't know by the day after election day.

It's a huge hole and a flag I've raised for many years as we've asked for more headcount through the budget process. We are about to finally have a person start in a position next month that took a year to fill (not our choice), and a headcount we fought to get in the 2015 budget, hopefully, will be filled in early 2015 before our school mail-ballot elections.

Keen observers of the blog are probably now putting together why I was so impassioned about our 2015 headcount need during the June budget hearings.

It's hard having an obvious operational box of thumbtacks thrown in front of us on our road to the election. Yet, I wanted to recognize Tom for his dedication to our voters before he stopped working.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach agreed, and he came to election worker training last Wednesday, at my request, and presented Tom with a National Association of Secretaries of State Medallion Award for his service.

We worked to schedule the award around Tom's work schedule and treatment, as well as the Secretary's own busy schedule.

This is an exclusive, national award. As a point of reference, only four others have been awarded the Medallion in the last four years in Kansas and the only two people from Johnson County to have received the award were my predecessor, Connie Schmidt, and our deputy election commissioner Karen Browning, who retired after more than 40 years of service to the county.

Tom thanked Kris in front of 250 election workers. Ever-proud, Tom had still not made his condition known to them. His voice was raspy as he thanked the Secretary and said that he had laryngitis, so he wouldn't be able to give a speech.

In the days ahead, he indeed lost his voice. However, he never lost the will to be the voice of the voter, and that dedication will be his legacy.

Tom was in the office Sunday and as I left, with a bottle of water in my right hand, he came up to me and took the bottle so he could shake my hand and thank me for the award presentation.

Clearly, that was goodbye. I didn't see it then, and this post is the beginning of me saying goodbye to him as well.

This was just last Wednesday, 8 days ago.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-8159382147720453852014-10-19T18:48:00.003-07:002014-10-20T10:29:48.744-07:00Advance Voting is Underway!Advance voting in person begins tomorrow and if that has come up on you, dear reader, fast, it has on us, too.

We literally have been too busy to type, mostly because we've been having election worker training each day while pumping through thousands of advance voting applications and ballots.

This time is also the period for the latest installment of "People Move."

Our ballots went out Wednesday, with a couple thousand going out each day since. Before that, however, we sent a teaser postcard to all voters to remind them of the upcoming election and their advance voting options.

This mailing list for the postcard was created in September, about a month after all changes from the August election were finalized. Any postcard that came back undeliverable in July resulted in an updated voter record. Provisional ballots that required address changes were updated. New registrations were processed.

Yet, in that time, we have this, in terms of undelivered postcards:

The pictures show the same number, with the second picture just now sorted so we can begin working these. Funny, those outside of elections have no sense of the number of transactions we process and what list maintenance means.

Further, the linkage to election offices and the mail service is incredible. Postage is such a huge expense. Mailing the postcard, which allows us to be compliant with the National Voter Registration Act, costs about $130,000.

Yes, that flimsy little drab postcard costs that much just to mail. It makes you wonder how much all of the candidate campaign and Johnson County government mailings to households cost (well, it makes me wonder, but it also makes me wonder--how again is it that the post office is struggling)?

Our first day ballots are photographed in little cages. They look tidy.

Ballots mailed Wednesday night, some
voted and returned by mail Saturday.

And, on Saturday, we already had some back in the mail! Note, however, the small number of white envelopes. We'll get more. Those are ballots that were undeliverable. We'll likely mail out about 40,000 ballots in this election and somewhere between 500 and 1,000 will come back undeliverable, which usually means that people moved between the time they requested the ballots in the last couple of weeks and the time we mailed them.

In-person advance voting will be at our office, 9800 Metcalf, the Great Mall of the Great Plains, and the Johnson County Northeast offices starting tomorrow morning.

Below are a couple of photos from this summer that I thought were worth a giggle from the Great Mall.

The first just looks funny to me because of the "Quite Please" that displays so prominently with no voters yet, as though it's an election museum.

The other is from advertisement inside the mall. Apparently, mall management anticipates a stressful election season.

We have much going on with more updates soon. Tomorrow night, we have election worker training for high-school students. Tuesday and Wednesday, we have the all-important opening games of the World Series.

The last time a World Series came into play during a November election cycle in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were running. There was no advance voting.

I do wonder how the Series could impact voting patterns. Maybe there will not be an impact, but that seems unlikely.

My early thought is that advance voting may trend slower than it did in, comparably, 2010, with a possible pick-up late next week. However, Halloween is on a Friday (a great late-afternoon, early evening to vote, by the way--NO lines at our office), so that will get in the way of voting.

Intuitively, I think some advancers will just wait until election day, but election day is unpredictable (and what if it's the day of the victory parade?).

Of course, our election planning is pretty baked at this point. Polling places were secured a year ago, advance sites buttoned down in January, and all new election worker training will be over tomorrow. We have to finish new training before the onslaught of voters to our parking lot--we don't have enough parking for new worker training AND voters.

We conduct refresher training now offsite, in classes of 250+ at a time, at the University of Kansas Edwards campus. Moving new worker training is much more problematic because we have smaller classes and an entire "Perfect Polling Place" for skits to help the workers connect the dots.

Something's got to give on that, though, space-wise. That's a problem to ponder in late 2015, our next chance for a breather, maybe.

Live voting engines start tomorrow.

Photos above and below from the Great Mall.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-48523570307610242182014-10-18T05:41:00.001-07:002014-10-18T05:41:38.910-07:00Game Seven!
I'll have a new post this weekend, but with the Royals going to the World Series, I have some special memories related to Game 7, and the All Star Game, and is the backdrop to similar memories I have with these types of games with my daughter.

So, reposting. Back to elections tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012
David Newby, 1930-2012

I've tried to have a post each Tuesday in recognition that there is always an election going on somewhere on a Tuesday.

Plus, as those in the election world can attest, the Tuesday election day is often the slowest day in the cycle. The work is done and we leave the day open for mayhem, and thankfully there usually isn't any.

Today's Tuesday post is brief.

My father died this morning at 1 a.m. He was 82.

He suffered a stroke last year and his energy level dropped over the fall and winter. In fact, I planned to take him to a Royals game last September and he didn't have the stamina to go.

He took me to the All-Star game when it was in Kansas City in 1973. I still have the ticket stubs.

I knew he couldn't go this year, hosted again in Kansas City, and I probably couldn't have gotten tickets, anyway, so I was planning to be with him on July 10 (also a Tuesday) and watch it on television.

In 1985, he obtained two tickets to game seven of the World Series, Royals-Cardinals, and he gave them to me on the condition that I went with my brother. It was the biggest moment up until then for the Royals--and it remains their biggest moment--and he passed so his two sons could go.

He was a Rotarian and believed in "service above self." My brother died years ago (it's a very odd feeling to be the only family member still living from my childhood Christmas photos) and my dad also gave me a defining memory of my brother from sharing that World Series celebratory night, one of the greatest nights ever to be living in Kansas City.

I was with him on March 24 and it was clear he was declining. I visited him yesterday afternoon after coming back in town from training, and I was not surprised to get the call this morning.

Since I've been at the election office, I've never been quite sure he understood exactly what I did. With him leaving on a Tuesday, I think he did.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-33658009699931446762014-10-09T18:04:00.001-07:002014-10-09T18:22:18.654-07:00We've Got Ballots!In the world of baby steps, we started printing ballots last night and are preparing to fulfill the 11,000 or so advance ballots by mail we have in the pipeline thus far.

Ballots are first mailed next Wednesday.

In between now and then, registered voters will receive a postcard in the mail that reminds of the upcoming election and advance voting options.

That postcard will generate about 5,000 applications for ballots by mail over the weekend. By the time Wednesday rolls around, we likely will have around 20,000 ballots ready to mail.

We'll cut it close with envelopes on hand--intentionally, we order a couple of cycles ahead.

However, our cushion of envelopes arrived yesterday in the wrong color--the printer's mistake, but it's just one more thing that we'll be doing twice in this election. We hope to get new, correct replacements in 12 days.

We have more than 40,000 outgoing envelopes on hand--the number of ballots by mail issued in November 2010, but we will sleep better once we have a backup sock drawer full of warm envelopes.

Envelopes are unusual in that they take an incredibly long time to print. I'm not sure why, but they are complex.

In fact, we were the first jurisdiction in the country to design a privacy flap that covers the voter's signature in the mail, and that flap adds extra time and cost.

That was the issue in 2005--identity theft. I guess it's still THE issue in 2014, but covering the voters' signatures in the mail was one of the first decisions I made when coming to the office.

Anyway, that all takes a backseat to the "whoo-hoo" we exclaimed when our ballots were ready for production. Once the delay occurred with the US Senate candidate, we fell into the competitive queue with many other jurisdictions using our printer. That printer's schedule, and probably the ballot delivery of other communities in other states, had ripple effects from this delay.

Even printing our mail-ballots here, we had to have things finalized with the printer first, and we couldn't begin creating voter cards for our 1,400 machines that we will use in this election, either.

Once we got the thumbs up, our crew had to re-proof the ballots. Stack three large phone books on top of each other and you'll have a sense of how many pages we had to proof, fast.

If you are too young to know what a large phone book looks like, use dictionaries for this visualization.

If you are too young to know what a dictionary is, look at your laptop computer right now and imagine the cresting point at the top of the screen as the top of the stack of ballots to proof in order to visualize.

If you are too young to know what a laptop computer is, stand your iPad on its end and that will sort of give you a visualization of the magnitude.

If you are too cool to check the web with anything but a smartphone, I can't help you.

In such a case, just know it's a lot of paper, bro.

Anyway, now the office is abuzz. Advance election workers are brushing up on training, machines are being tested, and we're pondering "what ifs" related to the Royals' World Series run.

For instance, next week's game 5 in the championship series is scheduled during election worker training. We'll probably have a few workers reschedule their training.

World Series week, if the Royals make it, may impact in-person advance voting. It may lead to more requests by mail (hello, envelope printer McFly?) or it may have people waiting until election day to vote.

Then again, if they win, election day may be Parade Day. That may impact turnout or the time of day people vote.

Election administrators embrace worry like a rescued lost puppy. For a moment, with our ballots, worries were gone. That was short-lived.

It's nice, at least, to be worried about events in the future, rather than the impact of things in the past. It was late in arriving, but we're having an election!
Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-89978028191104476242014-10-01T08:28:00.000-07:002014-10-01T08:56:57.319-07:00T Minus 35 DaysSuccessful companies often talk about compressing the product delivery cycle, shaving off days from concept to market.

Here, on October 1, 35 days from the election and just 14 days from the time our advance ballots by mail go out, we're living the reduced go-to-market life.

It's some sort of crazy complete circle to the info you see on the sidebar here--"Many people think election officials only work a couple days a year—I guess that's sort of the point of this blog, to explain what we do on the other days."

This year may make the "what do you do the other 364 days?" a relevant question.

At the very least, I think we should get some sort of Six Sigma award for taking weeks out of the election preparation cycle.

How'd we do it? We've spend almost a month awaiting a final candidate list following the last-second withdrawal of a candidate, a Kansas Supreme Court case, and district court case that may be resolved today.

It brings up, though, a question we've been asked frequently--how much time do you need to print ballots?

Now, I'm not sure that anyone has actually made decisions that sync with our answer, but it brings up more a need for a brief primer on what "print ballots" means.

First, ballots are customized to a voter's specific candidates and those candidate lists in various races are rotated. We have nearly 500 precincts in Johnson County and about twice as many ballot styles in this election.

There isn't one ballot for all voters.

That seems like common sense, but with questions last week about why we sent overseas ballots when we did, the answer begins and ends with "time to prepare the ballot," not time to print.

Those ballots, by the way, look like ballots. They have hashtags on the sides and all, but they can't be scanned. They will have to be hand-counted. On the overseas and military side (by the way, military gets the attention but about 90 percent of our overseas ballots are non-military), it's as though we created an entirely separate election, with unique ballots, that coincidentally have the same races as our real election.

Those overseas ballots were four pages long. Our "real" ballots will be 8 1/2 by 18 inches, front and back. We broke up the overseas ballots in case they were faxed back. Our fax machine could handle the longer paper, but we don't know for sure that the overseas voters' can.

Plus, fax machines don't send back ballots in a duplex manner. If we only got a partial ballot back, it's possible that we'd never be able to contact the voter to let him or her know.

Those ballots, often emailed, included other attachments customized to the voter. Emailing our ballots was literally a full-day effort and we like to leave ourselves some cushion (at least a day) to ensure we met deadlines in case there were any technical issues. Murphy's Law has come into play several times on election day, knocking out Internet service, for instance.

Anyway, back to the "real" ballots.

Printing ballots implies that an election has been set up and a ballot is created. I've explained what it will look like on paper, but it has to have the same programming on our touch-screen voting machines.

We will have 1,400 of those in this election and can't begin to create the cards for each machine until the ballot is finalized. Then, we have to manually test each machine's logic and accuracy by going through a laborious voting routine and comparing the results against an expected outcome.

The downloading process usually takes at least two days and the testing--with 20 people--about 3 weeks.

This is a bigger deal than printing ballots, although that's no gimmee. But we begin delivering voting machines and equipment to our advance voting sites next week.

On the paper side, we are frantically entering advance-by-mail applications and likely will be sending out about 20,000 ballots on Oct. 15.

Our ballots are so complex that after a competitive bid process, the only local printer that could meet our requirements (the largest in Kansas City) pulled out after one attempt. I've never seen a company of that size, in any industry, say business was too hard, but I do respect that they told us before they let us down later.

So, all of our ballots are actually printed out-of-state, and our ballot orders usually are placed in early September. Earlier this year, we made the decision to print our own advance-by-mail ballots and provisional ballots at our advance voting sites with ballot-on-demand printers. So, we're only ordering our provisional ballots for the polls out-of-state.

Of course, those haven't been ordered yet and we're competing with many other offices for runtime in a November cycle, so we likely won't get the ballots back until the week before the election. That leaves no margin for error in proofing or delivery.

In fact, the whole process leaves no margin for error. Strike that--it invites errors, going over the margins. The fact that election administrators here are moving along with Plan S at this point is a testament to resolve.

Speaking of errors, we have to proof all of these various ballots and the audio that goes for each with ballots for those who are blind. We're busily proofing everything, waiting for the final word.

When we do print advance ballots, we'll print the envelopes at the same time, with a different printer. We'll apply postage at that time--or hopefully, anyway.

Our biggest obstacle right now--as it often is--isn't these formidable outside forces, but the internal processes at our county. We weren't adequately funded for this election, as evidenced by the fact that our postage needs at the front-end here have already "failed funds," which is our county's way of saying "out of budget."

Maybe someone knew we wouldn't be spending in September.

In any event, we hope today to get some word on "printing" ballots (as in, starting the entire work of the election), and our attention will quickly turn to mailing them.

Election Diaryhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-65845751701334396252014-09-23T05:36:00.000-07:002014-09-23T09:44:14.633-07:00Happy Voter Registration Day!It's National Voter Registration Day.

The Board of County Commissioners issued a proclamation last Thursday and we had a nice time showcasing the efforts of the League of Women Voters (who pushed for the proclamation).

Beyond that, as an administrator, I'm not sure what the "day" really does except gives us a topic. Like a sales person with a new product, National Voter Registration Day gives us a new reason to promote voter participation.

Last night, the Lenexa Masonic Lodge hosted me and 5 of our staff members for dinner. I spoke briefly about National Voter Registration Day but also used that moment to recruit election workers.

The Lodge actually is part of our Adopt a Polling Place program, where members work and give their earnings as a fund-raiser to their organization. They are building college scholarship programs with the earnings.

The program is such a win-win. We need election workers, and this is a very efficient fund-raising concept. The Good Shepherd Knights of Columbus has pretty much adopted two places with about a dozen members working.

I'm biased, but I think it sure beats working a concession stand at the Chiefs game, in dollars, patriotism, and workload (I said workload, not stressload). Plus, there's never Tuesday Night Football, which means election workers don't miss a key game by working.

One of the Best Practice Awards at the recent Election Center conference was a program with the this same theme, focused on getting companies to participate. The clever twist from that program was that the election office helped companies with an election of some sort (like the mock elections we do for kids, but with adults, asking them, for instance, their preference for a company promotion or advertisement). This got the adults engaged as potential workers. It's a concept we plan to---wait for it---adopt ourselves.

It was in Franklin County, Ohio. Here was their booth that presented the award:

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-69847294572405720152014-09-19T05:07:00.001-07:002014-09-19T08:42:32.597-07:00The Ballot, the Complete Ballot, and Nothing But the BallotWhile the last post spoke of the elephant in the room, the true elephant in the blog, of course, is the issue surrounding the Democratic candidate for US Senate.

Look elsewhere for any political thoughts, but the aspect of what this does as we prepare to administer the election is something I've been asked frequently over the past week.

We have a candidate who requested to be removed from the ballot in early September and discussion that went all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court to determine what would happen.

From dinner, an hour after the Supreme Court announcement.
If only I had the cookie on Tuesday.

The hearing was about an hour long on Tuesday morning and both sides (for removal, anti-removal) espoused that this was a simple issue. So, selfishly, I wouldn't have minded getting the Supreme Court decision, say, that day. Maybe Wednesday. Instead, it came late yesterday just as we were cresting upon the deadline to send out military ballots.

That deadline to send military ballots has been portrayed in the media as the deadline to begin sending ballots. It's actually the deadline to have sent all military ballots and new requests can be filled on an on-going basis.

The Department of Justice takes the 45-day deadline very seriously, and so do we. In fact, that 45-day deadline falls on a Saturday so we've assumed the deadline is the Friday before.

So, you may see why a decision at 4:30 on the Thursday before this Friday is kind of an issue.

Now, thankfully (?), we only have have about 75 voters in this bucket right now. By comparison, we had 1,500 military and overseas voters in 2008. Some of the reduction can be attributed to less overseas military involvement and the type of election year (2008 was a presidential, and an historic one at that).

Still, that's a pretty big drop. A federal law a few years ago required military voters to re-up their registration each year instead of it lasting for two years.

I've always questioned the motive for this. It reduced the number of ballots that were undeliverable, so that's good. But by reducing the undeliverable ballots, the overall number issued in any election dropped as well. Assuming the same number of voters returned the ballots, the return percentage against those issued improved and there are people in jobs where their performance is based upon that return percentage.

In a trade-off for a higher return percentage number (same number returning, just a better percentage), military and overseas voters have to register more frequently, and that's a hassle. My theory from 30,000 feet is that this law's requirement actually has reduced voter participation by military and overseas citizens.

Nonetheless, we have about 75. Mind you, that's 75 full ballots with more than just the US Senate race.

That's 75 four-page ballots unique to each voter. In order to have them optically scanned, we typically send the voters actual ballots, but when our actual ballots aren't ready to print, we have to send homemade unique ballots that later will be hand counted. With about 20 items for voting per ballot, and 75 ballots, that's a lot of hands across the water.

That doesn't begin to address the fact that soon we will have to mail about 30,000 advance ballots, in less than a month, October 15. We're usually getting our ballots back from the printer by now, not wondering when we'll send them to the printer. This October 15 date also is a fixed deadline by statute, not a beginning day, but an actually day. We will be toddling down to the post office that day with 30,000 envelopes that we hope contain the final ballot.

The good news here is that decision we made to print our own ballots for advance by mail. Operationally, had we not done that, there would be no blog post today. I couldn't type. We'd be totally paralyzed.

There are formulas that can be used to consider the payback of ballot-on-demand printer purchases. We chose to only go down this path if it made sense operationally, and that's an obvious prove-in now.

Economically, though, they have paid for themselves simply because of the cost we would have had to expedite printing of these ballots. Go figure. I just did.

Beyond the obvious issues stated, this is just life in elections. We sent ballots out by email to meet the Department of Justice deadline with the caveat that that there was litigation afoot and to please not vote the ballots and return them until we checked in again on Monday. We'll now be checking in today, saying corrected new ballots will be on their way once this issue is completely resolved and to disregard the initial mailing.

We're expecting that resolution to be a week from today. It often feels like we'll be working on a ballot some day AFTER the election. I'm hoping that continues to be a ridiculous thought.

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7923094224720419114.post-83537765614117018572014-09-17T09:53:00.000-07:002014-09-23T17:51:19.803-07:00You Get a Car! You Get a Car!It's been quite a while between posts and that is a fallout from many, many moving pieces we're chasing right now.

The moving pieces bring up a political thought, not in the purest political sense but closer than others this blog has addressed. I'll explain.

First, it may seem all non-Election Commissionery and all, but I like to watch Family Guy. Maybe it's because the dog is named Brian.

In any event, there is an episode where the characters play out the movie Star Wars.

Stewie, as Darth Vader, gets a briefing on security and learns of a tiny vulnerability in the Death Star, where if a missile entered this area at just the right trajectory (a 0.01 chance of happening, he's told), the entire planet-sized ship would explode.

"I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask," Stewie says, "but what's the 0.01? That sounds like a pretty big design flaw. Can't we board it up or, you know, put some plywood there?"

I don't observe anything as dramatic as destruction of an entire ecosystem, but I do think we are going through something that I feel like I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't raise.

It's not really a problem. I wouldn't even call it an issue. For us, it's life, but it is a dynamic that deserves awareness.

The trigger for this is the simple fact that we have seven elections in the next four months. Six were unscheduled.

We have the big one that everyone knows about on November 4. Then, five school districts will each have mail-ballot question elections on the same day in January. This, essentially, will be a full-county election, in five pieces, and is the source of many moving pieces, mostly in my mind. The elections carry equal parts excitement and panic, but I expect excitement will prevail.

Those elections were prompted by state legislation that allowed the schools to modify their budget formulas, but the elections were required to be mail-ballot elections. Mail-ballots may have been the best method for the schools, but making them special elections shifts the cost from a pile-on to an existing county election, where there would be no cost, to an expense of nearly a million dollars.

This is the rub (and not yet the "political" part of this post). Elections cost a lot of money because we have a lot of people in the county.

If Oprah Winfrey drew a winner from her audience and that winner got a new car, that would be expensive--a $25,000 prize.

But when Oprah gives one to everyone--"You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car," the overall cost balloons. It's just math.

So, an election that costs about $3 per voter reflects 21st century costs of paper, envelopes, postage, and persons to scan the ballots. But, if you turn to 375,000 people and say, "You get a ballot, and you get a ballot, and you get a ballot..." the overall cost balloons.

Math, it turns out, works the same in elections as it does with Oprah.

There can be debate whether an election should be a stand-alone, or added to an existing one, and that's really the area of awareness that should be raised.

But the idea that elections are expensive? Of course they are, because there are a lot of people involved.

(We've been looking at some old budgets and realized that our 2014 county expenses for elections will be the same as 1999's. Office expenses aren't the driver in election costs--the number of participants are).

It links to my ongoing belief that the cost of elections in Johnson County should be itemized on the property tax bill, as allowed by Kansas law and done in other large counties in the state. Such itemizing would cause some to be concerned about how little is spent on elections, some will be concerned with how much is spent, and this overall transparency and discussion, in my view, is government goodness.

As we go to the Board of County Commissioners for money related to these elections (with much of the cost later reimbursed by the jurisdictions), I'm sure the overall cost of the elections will surprise some.

Back off the overall cost--a function of the number of voters--and question, more, this: should something be done to limit special elections?

This isn't a question related to the school districts, except that it might drive more discussion on moving spring elections in odd years to the fall of odd years, obtaining a school holiday to use the schools as polling places, and, perhaps, having a more timely way for jurisdictions to utilize scheduled elections in the future rather than conduct special elections.

But we just found out that we needed to add into the mix of our November, then January (and the March and April) elections a special election in Roeland Park.

Roeland Park has a city council vacancy and is the only city in the county that fills these vacancies with special elections. This will be the second election of this type in Roeland Park this year and the fifth special election in my 10 years because someone has not fulfilled the full term in office.

We have that election in December now, completing the Election of the Month trajectory. It gets in the way, operationally, as we prepare for the school district mail-ballots and will cost the city about $5,000.

The alternative--and this finally leads to the political thought--would be the city council or the mayor appointing a replacement until the next election. Many cities do this.

Personally, I'm not a fan of that, and not because I'm on some business development bender at the election office. I just think that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be selected by, well, the people.

I also left my position early while on Shawnee's City Council when I was appointed election commissioner. I didn't have to, but I thought it would eliminate any potential conflict of interest.

Point is, I'm not judging anyone for not fulfilling their term. And, there's a large part of me that thinks that Roeland Park has it right, so there's no judgment there, either.

But, like Stewie, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't point this out. When people wonder what election administrators do on the other 364 days when there isn't an election, they are usually surprised to find that we average an election about every two months and that more than half of our elections are unscheduled, special elections.

But the conversation stops there. The cost of the elections is the elephant in the room.

Better yet, the cost of the elections is the flea in the room, hardly noticeable when there is one but difficult to ignore when there are nearly 400,000 in the room.

The issue here is that there are nearly 400,000 voters in our county, several jurisdictions, and probably a better and more economical way to make the government for the people more affordable to the people.

Not the same elephant/flea
concept in elections that is
discussed in this book, but
you try and find a royalty-free
Star Wars or Family Guy image!
(Besides, this book is a good read).

Maybe we should have quarterly, countywide scheduled elections and if something misses, it must wait. Or, maybe two of those would be mail-only and the parameters of the state's mail-ballot elections would change (currently, mail-ballots can only be for issues, not people).

It's time for a broad and thoughtful discussion of this, with the overall community, not just among election administrators.

Part of election geekery, in fact, is the discussion of, "Is there a better way?"

Is there a better way, for instance, to present items on the ballot? Is there a better way to get the word out? Is there a better way to streamline the voter experience?

These are questions we consider for fun.

This one requires a larger net, partnering with legislators, and engaging cities and voters.

The county clerks in Kansas have created a mail-ballot election task force and I'm co-chairing it, although you wouldn't know it because we haven't met yet. Why? Because we have so many elections; we're all too busy.

When we do meet, I plan to expand the scope of our thinking to cover these aspects.

In the meantime, the Election of the Month Club awaits!

Election Diaryhttp://email@example.com