* *** POSTMORTEM_2012-11-06 TXT - 12 Nov 2012 01:08:51 - JKNAUTH Postmortem on 11/6/12 Election at Precinct 01-43 ========== == ======= ======== == ======== ===== The election went well in precinct 01-43. We had long lines of voters when the polls opened and then a pretty steady flow during most of the rest of the day. The voters were polite and seemed to be in good spirits. We had no significant voter issues. Because we expected a heavy turnout, we had set up a number of tables to act as alternate voting booths. Sometimes we had over twenty people voting at the same time. Except for when the polls first opened, we never had very long lines. We had over 800 people come into the polling place, plus 11 curbside voters. Many in our precinct had already voted absentee (57% of those people who voted). The size of the pink list (Saturday absentee voters) was quite large (132 people). At least we did not have to mark A's for all those on the total absentee voter list (1038 people). Posting the Monday mail-in delta on the BOE website was helpful, allowing us to have a fully updated set of poll books when the polls opened. That delta was just three people. The total of in-person and absentee voters was about 65% of the 2800+ people registered in 01-43. These counts/percentages will change slightly by canvass day as late mail-ins are included and provisional ballots are resolved. We had almost no problems with campaign workers, in contrast to some previous elections. Although we had been told that an observer would come to our precinct and we had set up an area for him, he never appeared. We had one TV media visit; they had been to our polling place many times before, knew the rules, and were no problem at all. We had been warned that "party greeters" might appear. Several came in to introduce themselves to the Chief Judge and then went back beyond the 50-foot lines. We heard that a false rumor had been spread saying the votes of some absentee voters had not been recorded. So it was possible that a number of people might come to the polling place concerned about that and taking officials' time to check the voter status. However that did not occur. We were not told about Kids Voting until Monday morning. That was not good because buried in the four attachments to the e-mail was a statement (in bold text) that the Chief Judge needed to contact one of the Kids Voting people to arrange when they could do their set up. That might well not have been seen before it was too late. Procedures ---------- Our Help Table was very busy all day handling address changes, unreported moves, provisionals, transfers-in, transfers-out, and polling place look ups to direct walk-ins to the right place. Many of the provisionals were for "unregistered" people who said they HAD registered via the DMV or by mailing in forms printed from the Internet. Is there a problem in those areas? Even though our precinct had just been moved to a new Congressional district and had also been split across two NC Senate districts, we had no jurisdictional disputes or even questions about that, which was somewhat surprising. We had one "ID required" that slipped thru. (The Registration Table handled many more IDs than in previous elections.) It happened with one of the first voters, during the time when we had the opening burst of poll-opening voters. Both the Registration Table and the Ballot Table missed the "ID" on the ATV. It was eventually caught during the Chief Judge review of ATVs, but that was after the voter had left. The BOE was called to alert them and a detailed writeup was returned with the CJ material in the blue plastic bag. Having the Chief Judge (or some other official) periodically review all the ATVs at the Ballot Table is a good idea. Unfortunately we didn't have enough officials available to do this continuously. At best it could be done about every 15 minutes to go thru the ATVs that had been added since the last review. We did catch several problems that way and fortunately were able to correct them in time. A consideration we did not have to deal with this time would be the potential conflict of having the Ballot Table official, the Chief Judge (or appointee), and an observer (or observers) all trying to work with the ATVs. Handing out the "straight-party voting instructions" slips did not seem to be very productive. The slip duplicated the information found on each ballot and also posted in the polling booths. Yet people seemed to ignore ALL the writeups and often ended up asking officials the same questions. A lot of officials' time was spent retrieving the slips from booths or dropped on the floor. In this election we had fewer problems with ballot packs not containing exactly 100 ballots. All but one of the nine packs we opened did have 100 ballots; the other had 101. In the past over a third of the packs typically had more or fewer than 100. To help collect the data for end-of-day reconciliation, we had put together a worksheet. For the completed 11/6/12 sheet see http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Count_Reconciliation_2012-11-06.txt. We reconciled exactly when the 101 vs. 100 pack was adjusted for. Generally all the procedures worked well. However filling out provisional envelopes seemed to cause some problems and the Help Table officials often had to go back and make corrections while doing that complex operation. Hardware -------- One of the Ballot Table Officials reported that the barcode scanner seemed to sometimes turn off sooner than the normal timeout, e.g., when he was switching from one barcode to another. He wrote up the problem on a red tag. Our voting enclosure can get dark in some places. The battery-powered booth lights help a lot, but we were given only five lights even though we had eleven booths. (We had requested more lights in the past, but still got only five.) As best we could, we lined up the booths under ceiling lights in Raphael Hall, but that could not be done for all of them. Also the battery-powered lights did not fit well in the new black booths and we had to tape them there to prevent them from falling out. That problem did not seem to exist with the old blue booths we had been given in the past. We supplied three clamp-on lights to use at the Registration Table. For the first time we actually had the AutoMark used by people who really needed it. Three visually impaired people used it this election. In the past fifteen elections starting when the AutoMark was introduced in 2006, we had always set it up, but it just sat there all day clunking and talking to itself. It was certainly nice to see it finally put to good use and that the voters were very happy with it, as they volunteered to say. None of the three had ever tried that device before, so the Chief Judge spent 5-10 minutes with each one showing them the basics and getting them started. They then proceeded on their own. Given the long ballot, each took 15-20 minutes to get the ballot printed. Because of the long ballots, the BOE was concerned that ballots might not stack well in the ballot box and would jam the scanner or diverter. During the day we periodically joggled the ballot box by moving it back and forth as well as side to side. When we opened the box after about 500 ballots, as required by the BOE, we found the ballots had all fallen to the bottom as they should. Because we could hear the ballots falling down when we did the joggling, we do think the joggling helped. The BOE documentation, e.g., FAQs files, stated that cell phones should not be allowed in the voting enclosure, e.g., for reviewing notes when filling out the long ballot. However the signs provided by the BOE did not cover this aspect of "No Cell Phones". We put together some signs to emphasize that cell phones could not be used for anything in the voting enclosure and provided an example list of precluded uses that people might not have considered. We also made a sign and provided materials to let people copy notes from their phones in an area outside the voting enclosure. See http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Sign_No_Cell_Phones.htm and http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Sign_Pads_for_Cell_Phones.htm. Documents --------- Here are some final comments on the documents to keep in mind when doing the updates for next year: 1) In Help Table Flow Chart #1, once you add the "Check Section B for completeness" item to column 2 - block 2 (a comment made in a previous review), the "Different" up arrow from that block should no longer go straight up since that would point to a block that would just redo some operations. Instead it should tilt to the right and point to the "When did the voter move" block. 2) In the "Opening the Polls Checklist" somewhere there should be an item "Confirm that the three ballot box bins are empty". That was done during Monday set-up, but should be done again when opening the polls to make sure no one had stuffed the ballot box overnight. Jeff Knauth Chief Judge for Precinct 01-43