* *** POSTMORTEM_2018-05-08 TXT - 14 May 2018 00:59:22 - JKNAUTH Postmortem Report for Precinct 19-19 for 5/8/18 Election ---------- ------ --- -------- ----- --- ------ -------- We had a low turnout in precinct 19-19 for the 5/8/18 primary election -- about 7.0% at the polling place and 2.6% via absentee voting (mail-in or one-stop) for a total of 9.6%. The weather was excellent. Voters did have to find their changed polling place for the new (as of 2017) 19-19 voting precinct and some said that was not easy. See below for an attempt to help fix this. Statistics (voters registered by 5/1/18; voting numbers for 5/8/18) ========== Registered voters: 5971 Tabulator vs. ATV counts: 419 vs. 419 Provisional ballots: 3 Spoiled ballots: 5 Emergency bin ballots: 0 Challenged ballots: 0 Monday-list absentees: 154 Last-minute absentees: 2 ---- Total absentees: 156 Write-in ballots: 0 Curbside voters: 7 AutoMARK voters: 0 Observers: 0 Polling booths: 17 (including provisional and accessible) Total chairs at tables: 0 (at 0 large tables) Transfers out: 0 approximately Transfers in: 3 approximately At wrong polling place: 10 approximately Ballot Count Reconciliation web page: http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Count_Reconciliation_2018-05-08.htm For this election we did not count the number of ballots as soon as a pack was opened. This may have led to a reconciliation problem. Sanford Creek Elementary School Polling Place ======= ===== ========== ====== ======= ===== This was only the second time Sanford Creek Elementary School (SCES) was used as a polling place. It was again excellent with great support from the people at the school. See last year's postmortem report, http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Postmortem_2017-11-07.txt, for more about SCES as a polling place. A significant problem about SCES is that we found the public knew little about it -- location, parking considerations, "car pool" line problems, even the fact that it is now their polling place, etc. Last year I had started a web page to provide such information. I had provided a link to it on the Nextdoor community website for nearly 30 local neighborhoods and gave out slips with the web page address on election day. This is the page as it existed at the time of the 5/8/18 election: http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/19-19.htm_2018-05-08.htm. This year I also set up a poster board in the voting enclosure to display some of the maps and parking diagrams from the web page. Hopefully, one way or another, by the next big election people will have found out more details about this new polling place. Long Setup and Takedown Times ==== ===== === ======== ===== SCES is a complicated polling place to set up and take down. It takes a lot of time and effort. The Media Center (the voting enclosure) has much furniture to support their student activities. That's good for us because we make good use of it. But it must be moved around to make room for all the poll booths and to arrange for the desired voter flow. Then it must be moved back before we leave. In the 2017 election they asked us to leave the furniture as we had set it up for the election; they said they would move it back the next day. However for this May's election they asked us to restore their original arrangement, but didn't tell us this was needed until we were closing the polls. Unfortunately they didn't have photos or diagrams of the desired arrangement, so there was a lot of guesswork, which caused extra work. SCES said for the next election they would provide the needed placement information. Given that, we should be able to do the restoration more efficiently, but it will still take time, even with many officials doing the work. The outside area we must handle is also complicated, requiring us to place/remove many signs for the large main lot, alternate lots, curbside area, directions AWAY from the school's main entrance, etc. Also needed are many signs along Granite Falls Blvd. (over 0.7 mile) and up the long driveway to the school. I handle those signs Monday and Wednesday mornings, so no work is required by anyone during the during the normal Monday/Tuesday setup/takedown times. Staffing ======== Four of the eleven election officials initially assigned to 19-19 were replaced for one reason or another, some very late. Only three of the final eleven had worked at SCES before. However only one of our final officials had no previous experience as an election official and she learned quickly. Everyone worked very well on Monday and Tuesday, both individually and as a team. We were able to do a good deal of rotation during the day for the various positions. Given the low turnout for this election, we had no problems handling things during the day with this number of officials. We will need at least this many for the much larger turnout expected in November. Campaigners =========== We had no problems with campaigners. At this polling place they have a good place to work, which is on an upper level where the main parking lot is located and is far from the 50-foot zones on the lower level by the school building. On the upper level they can easily interact with voters walking down to the level where the voting enclosure is located. The campaigners don't need to come down to the lower level, so they don't. They did leave some signs around the parking lot area which we collected into a pile for SCES before we left. Voter Complaints ===== ========== 1) One lady, a mother, was very upset that a school was being used as a polling place. She had serious security concerns, understandable given all the recent shooting incidents at schools. I pointed out that our voting enclosure was isolated from the main part of the school. The only exit from the enclosure to the school is blocked off and is only for an emergency exit during election day. That didn't matter to her. She most definitely wanted to know where she should register a complaint. I gave her Gary Sims' name and position. I also told her that many election officials and WCBOE staff people had recommended that election days be designated teacher work days, so no students would be around; however this proposal has not been accepted by the Board of Education. 2) Another lady came in and asked one of the officials if she could use the restroom, which he permitted. Only later did he find she was not a voter (nor a campaigner either, our previous problem in this area). She just needed to use the restroom. He later saw her and told her the restrictions about coming into the voting enclosure. That did not go over well and she said she would complain to the BOE. 3) We had a number of people who tried to show their driver license as an ID. They just didn't understand it was not needed except for "ID Required" voters. They were quite satisfied when that was explained to them. This was in contrast to last November's election when someone had insisting on showing his ID, just to make a point, no matter how much he was told it was not necessary. 4) One voter, who said she had been a Chief Judge elsewhere, said she had tried to volunteer to be a precinct official four or five months ago, but had never been contacted after she sent in her information. I did not get the details of what procedure she used to do that. She seemed to be an excellent candidate. Unfortunately I did not record her name; I should have done that and put it in the blue bag. In case the site she used was a black hole, I told her how she could link to the Wake County BOE site for the "Be a Precinct Official" web page. Our Coordinator said she had heard other such stories where potential volunteers got no response. Is there any sort of immediate feedback to volunteers? Pollbooks ========= Unfortunately the pollbooks still had the letter splitting problem that election officials have often complained about. We had many pollbooks, with most starting and ending at weird spots. Some even split a group of voters with the same name across two books, raising the question of which RT line should the voter stand in who happens to have that name? ATV === In the certification section of the current ATV, there are a bunch of pre-Xed checkboxes, e.g., "I am a United States Citizen." followed by a blank check box for "For partisan primary elections ONLY: I am registered as noted above. If I am registered Unaffiliated, I will receive the following ballot:" We were told in class and a FAQ to be sure to have the voter X that box as part of certification. We did that religiously. Why not just have that box pre-Xed as are all the ones above it? Is the concern that the same ATV format will be used in a non-primary election and therefore should not be checked? Also, it seemed confusing to merge the UNA ballot selection into the same sentence. Many non-UNA voters went ahead and marked their registered party in the boxes below. An FAQ said we should accept this, which we did, but it shows that voters were not reading that sentence correctly. That's a bad sign from a human factors perspective. On the PO website neither the RT perfect scenario video nor the curbside video shows the marking of the "For primary partisan ..." box mentioned above. Are they just for general elections? If so, you need a primary election RT video and an unaffiliated voter video. Audits of ATVs and Provisional Envelopes ====== == ==== === =========== ========= In this election I had time to audit all the ATVs and provisional envelopes. There were almost no errors. All the officials were being very careful and did not repeat any mistakes they might have made before. This was very good for a primary election which has multiple ballot styles and more complicated forms to complete than in a general election. Reconciliation Form ============== ==== In previous years we counted the number of ballots in each pack when we opened the pack. The printer sometimes does not put in exactly 100 ballots and a pack may have several too many or too few. (See http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Count_History.txt for a report about the counts for twenty past elections.) This problem seems to have lessened lately and the WCBOE has discouraged doing this verification, so we did not do the counting in this election. However when we did our end-of-day reconciliation, in the inventory part of the Reconciliation form, we found that there were five fewer ballots accounted for than were supposed to have been delivered. Presumably because the six opened packs had only 595 ballots instead of 600. Because we had not counted to verify each pack had 100 ballots, we could not be sure this was the cause of the shortage. In contrast, the ATV count did exactly match the Tabulator count -- 419 for each. That's the critical number and it must match or there must be a good explanation if there is a mismatch. The inventory number is much less important and the WCBOE is not too concerned if it is off by a few ballots. For details see http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/Ballot_Count_Reconciliation_2018-05-08.htm which is a digital version of the worksheet used at the Ballot Table to provide input for the Reconciliation Form. While rushing to try to meet WCBOE's 9:00 delivery cutoff time, we miscopied one number on the Reconciliation Form. I realized that when I got home and sent an email to the BOE to point out the error. It was in the ballot inventory section and obscured the ballot shortage described above, which was probably due to one or more packs having fewer than 100 ballots. Documentation ============= Precinct Officials Website -------- --------- ------- 1) Put a change date before each of the video links and a global "last changed" date for the whole page of training links. See my web page for a possible format, http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/WakeBOE_TOC.htm 2) Put a revision date by any updated FAQ item. Ballot Table Quick Guide ------ ----- ----- ----- Page 1: Does not mention taping the ATV bag to the table. If it is not feasible to tape it (maybe too heavy), keep it in the gray bin with the ballot boxes; that's what we did. Page 1: Second section, second bullet: The packing list was not in Ballot Box 1; it was in the CJ bag. Help Table Quick Guide ---- ----- ----- ----- Flow Chart #2, last block on left: Need better formatting to separate the "Return to the voter's listing" line from all the other lines, so those other lines are better grouped visually. None of our three HT-trained officials remembered hearing anything in their class about how to handle the voters on the last-minute absentee list. To cover it for this election, I just told them to check the list (all of two names for us this election) whenever they did a Voter Search to see if that person had already voted. This is the same thing I reported for the 11/7/17 election. All Officials Quick Guide --- --------- ----- ----- Page 1: Need to mention "No Campaigning" signs in the "Tuesday Before Opening the Polls" section. Page 2: Fourth bullet from bottom will need to change now that cones, etc. must be returned by CJ to collection site Election Manual -------- ------ Removal of modem transmission: Page 17: Second line from bottom Page 19: Add third tape in two places: signing and mailing Page 98 and 99: Delete Page 19: Last line: page 27 -> page 25 It's not a good idea to list explicit page numbers for another document since the documents can easily get out of sync. Page 64: My 2/22/18 email to Amanda Kulawik on curbside processing Page 73: Broook Rd. -> Brook Rd. in label (Dutch?) Supplies ======== 1) At least one of the sign stands (e.g., for RT/BT/HT signs) had a loose base. Turning the screw did not tighten the base. I forgot to red tag it, but it seems to be a common problem -- I tagged several in the last election. Nevertheless, we need more sign stands in future elections, e.g., for "Wait Until Called" and for hanging direction signs. If not provided, we could just use the BT/HT stands, which tend to be superfluous except at the RT. This election we stole one from the HT, whose location is not at all hidden in our configuration. 2) There was only one roll of blue tape in the supply bag. In recent prior elections there were two, which was good since the tape is often needed in multiple places at the same time. We need a lot of tape for hanging signs, floor marking, and stringing as barriers. Now I always bring a second roll from home. 3) I also brought a roll of light tan masking tape from home to make arrow pointers on the carpet. These directed people from the polling booths to the Tabulator (a long walk in our case). Last year we tried to use blue tape for this, but it didn't show up well enough on the Media Center's dark carpet. 4) Last year the WCBOE let me keep a number of signs (general and site-specific) so I could put them out Monday morning on the long, winding road leading to our new polling place. I then retrieve them Wednesday morning and store them in my garage between elections. That has worked very well. Not only would it be dangerous to plant/retrieve the signs in the dark on Monday/Tuesday, but it would also take a long time. It takes me well over an hour because there are no good parking places near some of the signs, so a lot of walking along the road is required. 5) In prior years I had proposed that WCBOE put a file on the Precinct Officials website to list pictures and descriptions of the standard signs with some sort of unique ID for each sign. This would simplify CJ <--> WCBOE communications about signs. Here is a sample of what I proposed: http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/WCBOE_Signs.pdf 6) Having the separate kit bags worked pretty well, although I heard that there were some problems because inventory lists were not with each bag, so each area had to go back to a common inventory list anyway to make sure nothing was missing in their bag. 7) The curbside doorbell worked well. However the doorbell receiver is so large that it blocked both outlets, one of which was needed for the Tabulator. I brought a one-foot extension cord from home for the doorbell. 8) The AutoMARK died sometime late Tuesday morning -- black screen and no sound in headphones. It had worked during Monday setup and seemed to start OK on Tuesday morning, at least as much as I saw. Poweroff/on, unplugging, reboot, etc. did not fix it. I called the Help Line and they sent a replacement later in the day. 9) There were no Tabulator setup instructions in the Tabulator case. There had been a small manual in past years. (This hardware procedure is not covered in the Chief Judge Pocket Guide.) We knew how to do it, having done it many times before, but lack of this documentation could be a problem for others. 10) Does the WCBOE have any "No Parking" signs? That might help with some of our curbside problems. Or give us more cones. We are still experimenting to alleviate all the curbside problems. Next time we may try using masking tape to tape some temporary lane markers, etc. Chalk could be used, but isn't too visible to a driver and washes away in the rain See http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/BOE_Supplies.txt for some other supplies comments from past elections. See http://jgkhome.name/WakeBOE/BOE_Wish_List.txt for my general wish list. Hardware ======== 1) On our first attempt to start the Tabulator, we got a "Diverter Not Found" error after a few minutes. We executed the standard error recovery procedure, which worked although it led to a "Continue" display button instead of the display normally seen when the Tabulator is first started. I tried to reach the Help Line for guidance at that point, but got a long music hold which was taking us very close to "Polls Are Open" time, so I decided to just hit Continue. By luck that was the right thing to do. I did eventually reach someone on the Help line to verify what I did was correct and who said how we should handle the TWO zero tapes that had now printed: leave both attached and sign the second one. The "Diverter Not Found" ERP, e.g., in the CJ PG, needs some additional words to note that the Continue button will appear and needs to be pushed. 2) We did not have to empty the steel ballot box. We had no jamming problems. When we opened the box at the end of the day, we saw the ballots had fallen correctly. 3) Our gravel-laden soil does cause sign planting problems. The rubber mallet helps a great deal. Although it was pretty windy at times, none of our signs blew over. We did see a number of campaign signs blown over at our parking lot and along the roads. The Quik Stix signs seem to work well, although sometimes the plastic bar will break. Also it is easy to accidentally not pull up the rods when you pull up the sign. You need to grab the rods, sometimes one at a time using both hands. 4) Our scanner did not properly handle UNA ATVs, declaring an error on each one even when the correct ATV party was scanned for the selected ballot. It seemed to handle DEM and REP ATVs correctly. One of our BT people figured it out and demonstrated the problem to our Coordinator, who recorded it in her log. It may have been specific to that particular scanner (#164, I think). She did not have a good replacement for us to test, so we kept using the defective one for non-UNA ATVs (plus manual checking) and did only manual checking for UNA ATVs. I should also have red tagged this, but since the Coordinator had logged it and we had a workaround, I forgot about it. 5) Our HT Kit did not contain a power cord for the laptop. Our Coordinator brought us one Tuesday morning. She said this had also happened at another of her precincts. VAST ==== I did not hear any complaints about VAST, which continues to get high marks. We did not have a lot of work required at the Help Table for this election: three provisionals and many lookups to direct people to the right polling place or to handle an alternate name registration (birthday search was eventually used to find the person). Election Supply Pickups and Dropoff ======== ====== ======= === ======= 1) Saturday supply pickup went well. However, when I got home, I saw a number of the seals had popped off on one side as the ballot boxes moved around in my trunk. 2) The Monday supply pickup at Knightdale was well organized. They had the routes clearly laid out so a car line could form instead of the way it was two years ago. They had no trouble finding my material. It took me less than five minutes from entry to the lot to exit. They again get an A+ from me. I was there right around 4:00. That left me plenty of time to drive back to Rolesville and unload everything before our setup time. 3) In contrast, the Tuesday night dropoff did not go well. We were not finished with the end-of-day polling place work anywhere close to when I could drive from Rolesville to Knightdale by 9:00. At 8:30 I saw we still had almost an hour's work left to do in our large polling place. I called the Help Line to let them know I wouldn't get to Knightdale by the cutoff time. They told me to instead drive to the Operations Center in Raleigh when we finished. I said I would try to be there by 10:00 and did arrive at around 9:50. At the OC they quickly unloaded my car and did the inventory. I have sent an email to the WCBOE with some suggestions. Report written by Jeff Knauth, Chief Judge for 19-19 with input from the other officials for this precinct