* *** POSTMORTEM_2016-03-15 TXT - 20 Mar 2016 18:19:00 - JKNAUTH We had a pretty large turnout in 19-09 for the 3/15/16 primary election, about 35% at the polling place and 8% via absentee (mail or early voting). This was a presidential primary with a great deal of interest in the candidates and the weather was very good. This was the first election with a photo ID requirement. There were no "reasonable resemblance" rejections, but there were many provisional envelopes required for people not having an acceptable photo ID. Statistics ---------- Registered voters: 4224 (as of 3/1/16) M100 vs. ATV counts 1440 vs. 1440 (see below for a discrepancy) Provisional ballots: 58 Emergency bin ballots: 1 (see below for details) Challenged ballots: 0 3/15/16 Absentee List: 333 Late mail-in absentees: 2 Write-in ballots: 0 Curbside voters: 23 (one required provisional processing) AutoMARK voters: 0 Spoiled ballots: 8 "Reasonable Resemblance": 0 (requiring the three judges to decide) Observers: 0 Staffing and Working Time -------- --- ------- ---- We were probably about three people short of the number of election officials required to handle an election of this size in this facility. This day we always had four people at the Registration Table, two at the Ballot Table, usually two at the Help Table, and one at the M100 Tabulator, as well as the Chief Judge managing the site and filling in where needed (which should not be required). However that left us with no one to handle curbside. When curbside work was required, we had to steal someone from where they were currently working and have them go thru the long curbside process. Unfortunately there were many curbside voters this election, far more than usual for this site, often with several lined up for processing at the same time. That meant we often had to have multiple curbside workers, thus stealing people from multiple other areas. There were usually long lines at *every* election station thruout the day. All the officials worked very well during this long, arduous day and made few complaints. Because there was no break in the action, there was no time for people to take lunch or rest breaks. It was definitely not the way to have to work for a day that started before 6:00 AM and ended well after 10:00 PM because of long voter lines still existing at the 7:30 poll closing, and then data transmission and reconciliation problems after the last voter left. It wasn't until after 11:00 PM that the election supplies were dropped off at the new (*REMOTE*) Knightdale collection site. Because of everything else that needed my attention, I did not get to do nearly as much of the ATV and provisional envelope reviews as I normally do. Such reviews are very useful and usually catch a number of fixable errors as well as letting me warn people if they are making mistakes. I also did not have time to do some other, less important, Chief Judge tasks that I have handled in other elections. Some of the officials did not understand that they had to stay until we completely finished, no matter what. That was certainly understandable when problems caused us to still be at the polling place after 10:00 PM. However everyone stayed and helped with loading the CJ car, etc. Ballot Reconciliation Problems ------ -------------- -------- During packup we had some serious ballot reconciliation problems, which seemed to say we had a lot more ballots to return than we thought we had. I think I have figured out a very likely scenario, although I don't have proof that this was the case. See the bottom section of http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Count_Reconciliation_2016-03-15.htm. Also as noted there, I now believe the final ATV pack, which I did not have time to check, may have been misnumbered by 1. We were in M100 vs. ATV number agreement at 7:30 PM, but many voters were still in line to be processed, including the one that later resulted in an emergency bin ballot (see below). After the 7:30 check, an ATV numbering error probably occurred causing a subsequent mismatch: M100 + emergency bin (1440 + 1 = 1441) vs. last ATV number (1440). Emergency Bin Vote --------- --- ---- We had one ballot that had to be put in the emergency bin and finally in the emergency bag. The voter had used checkmarks instead of filling in the ovals. The M100 rejected the ballot, but the voter had already exited the enclosure. This was after 7:30 and we were making sure no one else got in line. Unfortunately our M100 monitor was acting as the end-of-line person after the 7:30 closing as well as being the M100 monitor, so she did not hear the M100 silent beeps until she got nearby again -- much too late to catch the voter. At the time everyone else was busy doing many other jobs, so no one could have been covering the M100 -- an under staffing problem. Pollbooks --------- As usual, the split lettering technique used for pollbooks made things harder for the Registration Table officials and the voters. Supposedly this was going to be fixed for this election, but all the procedural changes required by the new ID laws put the printing fix on the back burner. Hopefully it will be corrected before the next large election, if not earlier. Although the Registration Table was kept very busy all day and often had four lines, sometimes there was only one long line, whose voters all had to be handled by just one official using one large pollbook which only that one official could work with. The other three officials could do nothing to help process the voters in that line. The "winning" official varied during the day, depending on where the alphabetic clump happened to occur at the time. As has been suggested before, this could be alleviated by having more, smaller pollbooks which could be passed around among the officials. A longer term solution would be to do away with pollbooks, using PCs and printers instead, as is done at early voting sites. We know that would be a very big step and has a number of challenges to overcome: startup costs; requirement for officials with much more PC experience, who are able to handle when things go wrong as well as normal operations; requirement for adequate electric outlets at polling places; cabling considerations, etc. In the end, however, voters should be handled more efficiently by elimination of alphabetic lines and associated clumping on a single pollbook, quicker voter lookups, and maybe fewer ATV marking errors given the ability of the PC to make error checks before printing. Eventually there should probably be overall savings by eliminating the need to print pollbooks. Perhaps in a future election a few polling places might be used in a pilot program to test this approach. Provisional Voter Processing ----------- ----- ---------- The Help Table officials were kept very busy, mostly handling provisional envelopes. More forms to work with made the Help Table processing more complex and it took longer. The number of provisional voters started out fairly small, grew steadily, and then exploded in the late afternoon and evening. It continued to the end; the last voter processed was first handled by the Help Table. All day there was almost always someone being processed, very often one each by the two officials (we set up a second provisional booth). In the last half of the day, there was usually a line of voters waiting to be processed at the Help Table. Pre-Election Voter Education ------------ ----- --------- We did not encounter too many people who were unaware of the photo ID requirement details, which was not surprising given all the public education work done in prior elections and all the TV public service announcements, newspaper articles, etc. on this as well as all the posters hung in the polling place. However there were still some people who did not have an acceptable ID (especially some younger voters) and who then voted provisionally. The Help Table had to handle many "party dispute" cases. Some people did not seem to understand the restrictions imposed by registration for a specific party, as well as what a UNA registration allowed. Many of those people then voted provisionally, at least changing their party choice for the next election; others just took a voter registration form to send later to effect a party change. Before future primary elections, the BOE should do more to educate the public about party registration implications. And of course warn people to do a timely notification of any address change, or else they must face a much more time-consuming process when they try to vote, no matter where they vote. We seem to have spent a lot of money, time, and effort on everything associated with the photo ID requirement. However, I believe the real gotcha for someone trying to do voter fraud is the certification the voter must sign on the ATV saying 1) the signer is really the voter listed on the ATV, 2) the signer has resided at the listed address for 30 or more days, and 3) the signer has not voted before in this election. I understand that falsely signing this is perjury (a felony?). Unfortunately that text is in very *tiny* print. I'll bet hardly anyone has ever read it. Something similar (and also very hard to see) is on the provisional envelope, although there the voter would have more time to try to squint and read the text. Maybe the WCBOE and SBOE should now invest more in publicizing these "oaths" in easy to read posters, PSAs, news articles, etc. instead of spending so much on photo ID education material, especially now that photo ID has been taken thru the mill in a big election. Procedures ---------- The photo ID requirement, given all its aspects and multiple forms, has certainly much complicated the process to handle voters at the Help Table, as well as at the Registration Table to get a voter to the Help Table. For an unexceptional voter (one with an unexpired NC driver license with no name or image issues -- almost all the voters in our precinct), it was straightforward to handle and our Registration Table officials seemed to have few problems quickly processing unexceptional voters. The last I heard we had one passport and one military ID presented; all other acceptable photo IDs were were NC driver licenses. The Registration Table officials seemed to do a good job with correctly processing ATVs and the Ballot Table missed only a few RT errors, at least on the ATVs I was able to review -- e.g., a couple of uninitialed ATVs or UNA ATVs with the extraneous ballot styles correctly marked out, but with no party choice checkbox marked. I saw a number of cases where "R006" was marked on the ATV as the ballot given out at the Ballot Table for a required R005 ballot, but I saw no such mismatches with any other ballot styles. For a wrong style to actually be issued, both officials and the scanner would have had to make a mistake. I had asked both BT officials to always check signature, initials, and ballot style for each ATV; so each ATV should have been checked twice at the BT. Also, no voter ever said they had gotten the wrong type of ballot. I think these R005 -> R006 markings were "typos", just for that specific set of letters and numbers, not that the wrong style was ever actually given out. I had time to audit only about half the ATVs for this sort of error. I tagged those I found and alerted the Ballot Table official each time to be careful about this. At the Help Table, there was some confusion about which Provisional Envelope error to mark for some cases. I went thru the rationale and the HT officials made corrections. I had time to review only the first 20 or so of the 58 provisional envelopes. We had one case where the other precinct's transferring official had not initialed Section B of the ATV. The voter had to vote a provisional ballot in our precinct, the incoming transfer precinct. The BOE was notified so they could call the other precinct to point out their error. Documentation ------------- Very much documentation (including videos) was supplied by the Wake County BOE (WCBOE) and the NC State BOE (SBOE). Unfortunately many parts of the SBOE material did not exactly apply to Wake County election day procedures. Although put out on the polling place tables as prescribed, the big NC SBOE Station Guides were of little if any use in our precinct since so much of their contents was not exactly applicable. Additionally over the last several months, parts of the WCBOE documents frequently became obsolete, partly overridden by later WCBOE documents, which were trying to keep up with NC State edicts. There was no guidance on the WCBOE PO website about which documents were appropriate to use. In fact, for a long time, the worst (NC SBOE) documents were put at the top of the list. Also, the website provided no timestamp beside each link to say when the associated document had changed. There were very many documents/videos and it certainly wasn't practical to keep opening each one daily (hoping to at least see a revision date). To help clarify some of the procedures, for myself at least, a few days before the election I had put together Registration Table and Help Table summary sheets to state the latest procedure details as I understood them. I posted these files on my website and sent links to the BOE. We reviewed these summaries at our Monday setup. http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Registration_Table_Process.txt http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Expiration_Date_Checking.pdf http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Help_Table_Process.txt Pre-election question answering by the BOE was much slower, if at all, than for prior elections. Some of the documentation provided just before election day, purportedly to make a procedure easier to understand, actually made it harder, at least for me. We had some busy signals when calling the Help Line on election day, but eventually got thru and received help when needed. Presumably the WCBOE will get documentation consolidated and updated soon (by the June election?) and get back on track. In prior elections the documentation has been very good. I sympathize with the WCBOE's problems with trying to cope with the SBOE's changes and slow response speed. I definitely got the impression that many precinct officials were overwhelmed by all the material for this election, particularly when it was self-contradictory or ambiguous. Most of my prior documentation comments are in the 2016 section of http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/WakeBOE_TOC.htm. My BOE Wish List is at http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/BOE_Wish_List.txt. Equipment/Supplies ------------------ 1) Many of the comments in http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/2015_BOE_Supplies.txt still apply. 2) Signs saying "accessible" often seem to be misinterpreted by drivers coming to our polling place. "Oh, accessible means I can easily *access* that parking area. Great! Now I don't have to drive over to that other lot which is probably full. But I wonder what those orange cones are for? I'll just gently scoot them out of the way." So much for political correctness. Since many voters in this area seem to ignore all signs anyway, we did not use the "accessible" signs. (See below about bus parking conflicts.) 3) It would be helpful to provide or recommend some way for the Ballot Management System to keep the ballots upright as the number of contained ballots is reduced during the day, e.g., put in some sort of flexible stuffing (wadded paper?), adjustable cardboard divider (maybe clipped in place or held with a large rubber band), etc. Fortunately, elections with so many ballot styles do not happen often. 4) The BOE's long extension line for the phone was defective. The nibs were missing from the plugs. As a result the plugs came loose from whatever they were plugged into. This probably explained why the BOE could not reach us by phone at one time, why we had so much static during phone calls, and why we had modem transmission problems at the end of the day. I had brought a spare phone line and coupler in my CJ emergency kit. We ended up scotch-taping one of the BOE line's bad plugs into the coupler connected to my phone line; then the plug at the other end of my line was inserted into the M100. That connection was solid and the M100 was able to transmit. I didn't have time to red tag this at the end of the day, but did send e-mail to the BOE the next day. 5) Label on white plastic bag: Should explicitly say that only the CJ can seal this bag, as the red and blue plastic bags do say. I had also made this comment at the previous election. 6) Label on red plastic bag: poll book -> pollbook Bus Parking Lot Conflicts with Voter Parking --- ------- --- --------- ---- ----- ------- Compared to the last big election, for this election we had fewer problems with voters trying to park in the school's bus parking lot. As usual, many voters just ignored, didn't see, or misinterpreted our signs. We set out many BOE and school cones to try to block parking in critical areas, but voters parked there anyway, sometimes running over the cones. Fortunately, the school changed their bus parking procedure for this day only and no longer had the buses parking diagonally and filling up most of the lot, including our curbside and accessible parking areas. Instead the buses parked in a line parallel to the gym (and also there were fewer buses, I think). That at least let us keep our curbside and accessible parking areas in place all day, although the curbside officials had to squeeze between buses to go back and forth between the gym and the curbside area. We are about to move to some new polling place and do not yet know if the parking situation there will be better or worse than at Rolesville Elementary School. Voter Complaints ----- ---------- As far as I know, we had pretty few voter complaints compared to the last big election, even though we usually did have long lines. One voter who had to have a ballot spoiled insisted that she be able to take her old ballot to the booth while she marked her new one so she could remember who she had tried to vote for earlier. I was called over to explain that was definitely not allowed. She didn't seem too happy with that restriction, but so be it. Saturday Pickup and Monday Pickup/Dropoff -------- ------ --- ------ -------------- For Saturday pickup, the large number of ballot styles in this election made it much harder for all concerned to agree on the number/type of ballots in the boxes. In my case, they got it wrong the first time and had to unseal some of the boxes to correct their counts. This was a case where having poor seals was an advantage. It would be much easier to check the numbers if they printed a grid (or just hand-sketched vertical lines on the packing sheet) to make a column for each box and a row for each style. Then as each box is opened, in the column for that box, record in the associated row cells the number of packs in that box for each corresponding style row. The result should match what is listed on the end of that box. When all boxes are done, the total of the handwritten numbers in each row (times 100) should match the total preprinted on the packing sheet for the various ballot styles for that precinct. Here is an example of such a suggested form filled in as it would have been for our precinct: http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Packing_List_Example.htm The BOE moved my Monday pickup and Tuesday dropoff remote site to Knightdale, which is much further away than the prior site. (I suppose the prior site near Rolesville became unavailable for some reason.) I was notified of the change very late, well after we had agreed on the 5:00 PM Monday setup time for our polling place. That time was chosen with the assumption that the old site was to be used. Getting from the new pickup site to the polling place was a race to get there on time. Also, driving to the Tuesday dropoff after 11:00 PM was no fun at all. Fortunately the people manning the site were there before 4:30 on Monday and had stayed late on Tuesday. Both sets of people did their jobs well. Report written by Jeff Knauth, Chief Judge for 19-09 with input from the other officials for this precinct