Postmortem Report for Precinct 19-19 for the 11/5/24 Election

Last Updated:   11/21/24  21:22                 Jeffrey Knauth

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Summary

In the morning we had a very large turnout at the Precinct 19-19 polling place. The voters filled up the Disney line inside the Media Center and then the line extended outside all the way down the sidewalk to the road loop by the school's main door. However it eased up considerably by around ten o'clock and was very light the rest of the day. Although there was a little fog early in the day, the weather was excellent. There were no major problems.

Statistics

As of 11/6/24 the total number of registered 19-19 voters was 8594. Our precinct is now the fifth largest in Wake County, only four voters behind the fourth largest.

The turnout for this election was about 12.1% at the polling place and 68.8% via absentee voting (mail-in or one-stop) for a total of about 80.8% of the Precinct 19-19 people eligible to vote in this election. In contrast, for Wake County as a whole, 75.7% of the eligible voters cast ballots.

Tabulator vs ATV counts: 1038 vs 1038
Provisional ballots:        27
Spoiled ballots:            12
Emergency bin ballots:       0
Challenged ballots:          0

Curbside voters:            22
ExpressVote voters:          0
Observers:                   2  (2 Precinct-Specific Observers)
                                (0 At-Large Observers)

Eligible voters:          8594  (eligible to vote in this election)

Monday-list absentees:    5867  (the long list in pollbook box #1)
Last-minute absentees:      42  (the short list gotten from the PO website)
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Total absentees:          5909

Voting booths set up:       22  (includes 2 provisional and 1 accessible)
Total chairs at tables:      5  (at 5 square 42" tables)
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Total "booths"              27

Here is the Ballot Count Reconciliation web page.

Staffing and Email Considerations

We were assigned 17 Officials for this election; four were assigned just a few days before Election Day. There was a good mix of experienced and inexperienced people.

Contacting one of the original assignees back in August, either by email or phone, proved to be a tremendous problem. I made many attempts over a week and got the BOE Staff involved twice. That assignee eventually dropped out. There may have been some spam filtering problems with one or two other Officials. Finally, any email I sent from my normal address to one of the late-addition Officials was blocked. I reported the problem to the two ISPs involved. For her I had to use gmail instead of my normal address. Her ISP finally fixed the problem on 11/7/24.

I previously have documented to the Staff some suggestions about CJs contacting their assigned Officials, which often is a problem. This problem is exacerbated by the recent removal from the PO website of the list of Officials assigned to each precinct. That file could be used by any Official assigned to a precinct polling place to learn the name of their CJ; then they could better make sure emails from that CJ will be received.

Polling Place Setup

We used our standard setup for a large election. This time we had four Registration Table Officials: three handling the pollbooks and one assisting them and being available as a quick backup. We had two Ballot Table Officials even though we had only one ballot style and no scanner. We had two Help Table Officials, using two laptops and two Provisional booths. For Voting Assistance, we had two Voting Booth Officials, two Line Monitors, a Door Monitor, and a Tabulator Monitor. We had planned for three Curbside Officials, but our third curbside kit did not arrive, so we went with two working curbside. Fortunately we did not have a repeat of the 91 curbside users we had in the 2022 election.

Photo ID, HAVA ID, and ATV Form

1. One voter wanted to use a paper temporary driver license for her photo ID. She claimed the DMV website said that was permitted for voting. That was not what our BOE documentation said and the Help Line confirmed it was not good for the photo ID check. If there is such a DMV misstatement, it needs to be fixed. I couldn't find it. She also had an ID on her cell phone, but was told that not allowed either. She had lost her hardcopy driver license and the DMV had not yet mailed her the hardcopy replacement. She filled out the "Photo ID Exception Form" and voted provisionally.
2. We had one voter who got all the way to the Registration Table and found she had no ID. She had thought her driver license was mixed in a stack of credit cards in her purse. But at the RT she found it wasn't there. The RT marked the ATV as "No ID" plus "Photo ID" and sent her to the Help Table, from which she was allowed to go retrieve her ID. She did and on return was escorted directly back to the HT to complete processing. She did not have to go to the end of the RT line or break in that line. Note that in the morning that line was VERY long.
3. One RT Official mistakenly stuck the wrong label to an ATV. He then followed the documented correction procedure. Fortunately the owner of the mis-stuck label did not come in to vote.
4. There were about 30 "ID"s in our pollbooks and we processed several. I believe most of these voters used an unexpired NC driver license for their HAVA ID.
5. One voter used a passport for their photo ID. There were no other non-driver-license IDs that I am aware of.

I don't recall any other unique photo IDs or HAVA IDs or if there were any problems. I need input on this.

Registration Table

1. Since April I have been working with the BOE Staff on a possible replacement for the Registration Table Quick Guide flowchart. There are now two, essentially equivalent formats of my proposed replacement flowchart:
   letter-age size flowchart    and    index-card size flowchart
   At Monday Setup, for education purposes and to get feedback, I went thru this (the card form in particular) in detail with the Officials to point out some areas where RT Officials tend to leave out steps or do things they shouldn't do, like be concerned about an address on a photo ID. I particularly emphasized the division of the process into three steps and then what was required in each step. On Election Day if I saw an Official was not doing something correctly, e.g., not reading the label information back to the voter, I hauled out the card and pointed out the requirement and where it should be done. For background on this, see Actions for Remaining Proposals and Comments.

   A couple of the Officials questioned why I said the attachment of the label should be done BEFORE the photo ID check, the reverse of what is specified in the RTQG flowchart. I went thru some of the reasons listed in Forgetful Voters and Attachment Order, which are very important in a long-line, high-stress election as we had that morning. In an election with small lines and lower stress, either order could work. However I wanted to document something that handled both.

2. I found hardly any errors in my ADT audits. In almost all cases the Ballot Table Officials had caught the few RT ATV problems immediately and either alerted me to talk to the RT Officials or else the BT Officials had talked to the RT Officials directly. So those errors had been fixed before my audits.
3. Elsewhere in this report I discuss how we use the fourth RT Official and how we try to find voters to jump ahead to occupy any empty RT letter lines.
4. We had one Confidential voter and used the DOB on the label stub to confirm the label belonged to that voter.
5. About 7 or 8 people signed the Voter Assistance Log (I forgot to record the exact count for this report). There were no problems in this area.
6. One man came in with his own absentee ballot. We told him he could take it outside to destroy it and then return to vote normally at the polling place. He didn't understand why he couldn't just throw it in the trash can in the Voting Enclosure. We explained that was absolutely not permitted by the BOE -- no extraneous ballots allowed in the Voting Enclosure, even if destroyed. He finally accepted this, took his absentee ballot outside (back to his car, I assume), then returned to vote normally. Fortunately this was all after there was no longer a long line of voters.

Help Table

1. We had a lot of activity at the Help Table, including 27 provisional envelopes. There were MANY "V"s in our pollbooks in this election and the HT had to deal with a number of them.
2. Of course there were the usual transfer ins and outs. A problem this time was that Young Street is now closed to traffic because of major construction at the Young St./Main St. intersection. Young St. is the normal route between the 19-19 and 19-09 polling places, which are only a mile apart. Typically at 19-19, 19-09 is the polling place most often involved in "The voter just came to the wrong polling place." Now the voter has to take a long detour to get from 19-19 to 19-09 or vice versa. I marked up some maps for the HT to show possible detours.
3. When a voter finds their registration data is obsolete because they did not update it after a move or name change, we often hear: "I didn't know I was supposed to do anything to change that." or "I thought when I changed things at the DMV that would automatically update my voter registration information."

   The BOE really needs a better way to encourage people to keep their data current. Of course when the voter finds out on Election Day that obsolete data may cause them a lot of extra work, they do get encouraged to not have this happen again -- too late this time for both the voter the Help Table(s). The BOE also needs to better inform people about things like Voter Lookup and BallotTrax, particularly in the months just before an election. Such voter education would save a lot of extra work for both voters and POs on Election Day.

   Maybe the NCSBE could add something to the Voter Lookup facility to strongly remind people that they need to keep that information current and how to do it. If the address or name information is out-of-date, the voter and Precinct Officials will have much more work to do on Election Day.

4. Many voters reported problems about DMV registrations seeming not to work, at least not by the time the voter tried to vote.
5. One voter left before signing the provisional envelope. The HT Official did not notice in time. Fortunately, the voter later was reached by phone; she returned and signed the envelope. One voter forgot to take her pinned "Provisional Voter Instructions" sheet. I put it in the blue bag with an explanatory note.
6. Our HT reported via the Help Line that a transferring polling place had not filled out the left side of ATV Section D. The Help Line said they would contact the other polling place to caution them on the procedure.
7. On the other hand, the Help Line called our HT to say we had let some voter sign ATV Section A before sending the voter to the other precinct. Our HT Officials did not remember doing that. Did the Voter sign the ATV after leaving our polling place? Did the voter incorrectly sign at our RT and the HT did not catch it before sending the voter to the other polling place? We don't know. I called the Help Line to get more information, but the Staff person with the information did not call back.

Line Monitor

1. We used a Line Monitor to direct voters in our Disney line to the correct Registration Table waiting line. As usual we put file jackets over the top of the RT sign stands and attached paper sheets with very large letters to make them easily visible from the back of the RT waiting area, where seeing the letters is most important.

   If one of our three RT lines became empty, the Line Monitor would search back thru the Disney line, including the line outside, asking for any voter whose last-name letter would fit the empty line. The LM would then escort the eligible voter to the empty line. Avoiding empty lines kept all the RT Officials in business and sped up the combined RT processing.

2. Sometimes a voter waiting in a long line would say to a Precinct Official, "I don't know if I am in the correct polling place." Maybe they had moved, or hadn't voted in a long time, or their old precinct had divided, etc. Or maybe they were just lost. It's easy to tell them our precinct number and polling place name, as our door sign had already done, but that's probably less than they needed to know. Normally they would have to go thru the line all the way to the RT and then be found in the pollbooks (if they were lucky) or be sent to the Help Table (if they were unlucky and not findable in the pollbooks) to learn their correct polling place.

   We had a Student Assistant at our polling place this election. She often acted as a Line Monitor. If a voter asked her the "Am I at the right polling place?" question, I had her write the voter's name and address on a card and then take that to the Help Table while the voter waited in line. The HT could then do a quick search on the laptop to find the voter's polling place, which might in fact be ours. If the correct polling place was not ours, she would bring the voter's precinct number and polling place name back to the waiting voter. If directions were needed she could also retrieve those. The voter would then better know how to proceed. This was a good use of our resources and also made the voters happy, given the long wait times in line that voters sometimes had.

   Of course if the voter had known about and used Voter Lookup before coming to our polling place, all this could have been avoided.

Curbside

1. We had a moderate number (22) of curbside voters this time, consistent with the number of non-curbside voters. We used two Curbside Officials, which was good for this number of curbside voters. Occasionally we had multiple cars at curbside. I once saw three.
2. Because of our previous experience in a large election, when we got slammed with 91 curbside voters (and a line of 10 cars), I had asked for a third curbside kit. However it was not delivered at supply pickup, nor was it in the gray bin, nor was it delivered after I called the Help Line. Fortunately we did not have a tidal wave of curbside voters at any time, so having just two kits turned out to be enough.
3. The driver (a non-voter) for a curbside voter (his mother) insisted that he wanted to come inside to see her ballot put into the Tabulator. Since he was a non-voter he was told that was not allowed. Our Curbside Official nicely explained everything in detail and after a while convinced him that all was on the up-and-up.
4. Early in the day it was a little foggy outside and I could feel a change in the curbside ballots, sometimes making them a little harder to feed into the Tabulator. However all eventually took. Later in the day it got much less humid and the curbside ballots no longer had that problem.

ExpressVote

1. We had no ExpressVote users.
2. This time I had copied the relevant pages from the Manual and Chief Judge Pocket Guide so I could put a hardcopy of those pages by the ExpressVote. There is no hardcopy setup/use/takedown document packed with the ExpressVote as there had been with the AutoMark.

Tabulator and Black Tabulator Base

1. The edge of the latch hole in the Front Security Flap looked bent. It was very hard to turn the key to put the latch in the hole. I forgot to red tag it.
2. We used the Tape Overlap procedure in this election that we had experimented with in the last two elections. It worked very well with the long tapes. As soon as one tape finished printing I immediately started to print the next one. While the printing was going on we could do whatever signing, etc., was required for the tapes already printed.

Reconciliation Process

We had a temporary problem with the inventory part of the Reconciliation Form (what else is new). Our Ballot Table Official figured out the cause while the three Judges did other work. Then both the top and bottom sections of the form completed with exactly the right numbers. See Ballot Count Reconciliation for 11/5/24.

Voters

1. As usual many voters did not see or ignored the cell phone prohibition signs and continued to use the phones while in line inside the Media Center. Most immediately put away their phones when told about the restriction. One man gave me some flak, saying now he was just holding his phone. I was told that previously he had been using it, loudly, to watch/listen to the news or something like that.
2. I know of at least three people who took out their phones quickly to take pictures of relatives who were first-time voters. I was able to catch only one before the picture was taken. I'll bet many ballot pictures were taken inside the voting booths. There's no way we can catch those, especially given that phones can be used in the booths to access notes about how to mark a ballot.

Campaigners/Others

1. There were no campaigner problems on Election Day. Usually campaigners have been very good about taking down their signs before they leave after the election. However when I came back Wednesday morning to collect some of my own signs left in the Media Center, I found a large number of political signs still by the walkway down to the school and at the entrance to the school's parking lot. I took them down and put them in a couple of piles.
2. Well before the election I had worked with the Town of Rolesville Parks and Recreation Department Director to leave out the park's porta potty thru the election. Normally it is removed each year near the end of October. The porta potty can be used by campaigners; they are not allowed to use the restroom that would require going thru the Voting Enclosure. On the Media Center door we posted the relevant BOE document page as well as a picture of the porta potty and a map to it since it is out of view. Our Curbside Official said he had directed several campaigners to it. In prior years, not having restroom access caused some very stressful conversations between the CJ and anxious campaigners. So kudos to June Greene at the Rolesville P&R Department.
3. We print Tabulator tape #4 and I use blue tape to hang it flat on a well-lit inside wall by the door. I then go outside to let the campaigners know it is available to be photographed. Just before we leave I take it down so I can bring it home to prepare some web pages from the data. The CJPG says to remove the tape when we leave.

   We locked up a little after 9:00 and just when I got to my car a campaigner arrived and said he wanted to take pictures of the tape. He had missed my announcement about an hour earlier that the tape was available. So I fished out the tape, hung it on my car, and lit it with my flashlight so he could take some pictures. That seemed to work.

Observers

We had two Observers. The Democratic Observer was there from the start of the day until the early afternoon. The Republican Observer was there from mid morning until late in the afternoon. Both seemed happy with our system and were not a problem themselves. They did not try to talk to anyone except me. I did warn them to go into our Break Room to use their phones. I gave them our usual "Consider becoming a Precinct Official." recruiting pitch.

Coordinator

We had one visit from our Coordinator. We had a good, long conversation and I gave her some of my documents that we used for setup and RT work. She then went to talk with the other Officials and to watch operations. She was very happy with everything. I was at curbside when she left and saw her on the way to her car. She said she gave us a grade of 100%.

Hardware and Supplies

1. We were supposed to have been given two laptops, which we really need. Two was the number on our supply sheet. So I was surprised at supply pickup when they gave us only one. I asked the supply lady and she said one was all we were supposed to get. When I got to our polling place, I called the Help Line. They said they had made a mistake and would deliver a second laptop to the polling place before Monday Setup finished. They did. I got the impression that this had happened to some other precincts as well.
2. As noted above we were supposed to get a third curbside kit, but did not. It turned out curbside traffic was relatively light this election vs some in the past, so having just two kits was fine.
3. As noted above, I forgot to red tag a latch problem with the Black Tabulator Base.
4. We used the big, LED tripod system this time. The sidewalk turn to the Media Center is very dark for November elections. The system worked very well. Unfortunately the LED box is large and hard to pack with everything else on Tuesday night. I have found a way to put it on the floor by my car's back seat.
5. "Late Breaking News" says there is a QR code on one of the BOE signs. It wasn't on ours. I pointed this out to our Coordinator, who looked at our sign and verified there was no QR code. She said she had seen it on that sign in other polling places. Did we get an old sign?

See Hardware and Supplies for some other supplies comments from past elections that still apply, e.g., for the CJ lanyard and card holder.

See BOE Wish List for my current general wish list.

Documentation and Training

Over the months before this election I have emailed a lot of document comments. Some of the more significant are also noted in Actions for Remaining Proposals and Comments.

Miscellaneous

1. There was something called "DJ at the Polls" which played some very loud music out front, but more than 50 feet from the polling place entry and more than six feet from curbside. The Help Line said this was allowed. Later the DJ played some music that was definitely offensive to at least some of the voters in line. I talked to the DJ as did the Curbside Official. The DJ said some program selected the playlist and was supposed to filter out such offensive songs, but it didn't. They said they would fix it; I believe they did. I feel the loudness could still be a problem for some voters waiting in line, but who don't really have any option except covering their ears if they want to vote. I had never seen anything like this in past elections. It does not look like a good direction for the future.
2. The Last-minute Absentee list was not published on time Monday night since the Monday BOE meeting ran very late. There was no explanation on the PO website about why clicking the "Absentee Voter List" button just displayed "Coming Soon" instead of the promised last-minute absentee voter list. Calling the Help Line resulted in a dead line (no ring) and eventually a "Call Failed" on my iPhone. I tried calling the Staff line and at least got a voicemail saying the Staff was gone for the day. I finally emailed elections@wake.gov; Laura responded with the explanation about the BOE meeting still going on. The list was finally posted very late that night. There were 42 names for us. It took a long time to mark all the pink A's before I went to bed. This is not good.
3. In contrast, the Observer list was posted by the time I first checked. However the instructions for it were bad. They implied that the "at large" list to be printed was just one page long (vs the five pages required) and that things were sorted by precinct so all your precinct's Observers would be found on one page. Wrong. I had to search the whole file to find the two Observers for my precinct -- two more disjoint pages to print. Then when I got to the polling place the next morning, I received a text saying the Observer file had been updated and I needed to download the new one. That's not good to do on an iPhone. After another search thru the whole file, I found that in fact one of my Observers in the previous file had been replaced. There were still only two that I could find. Before publishing that file, someone should have at least sorted the two precinct-specific Observers parts by the listed polling place name field.
4. The Observer Guide says there is an Election Qualification Code on one of the Tabulator tapes and we are supposed to prevent Observers from photographing it. I was later told it was in the middle of the Configuration section of the zero tape. However I couldn't find it on our zero tape. I took pictures of the Configuration section of the first tape printed (the zero tape) in case I missed seeing it directly. I still don't see it in the pictures. Does it have another name? Is it really there? Nothing I saw looked like it needed hiding.
5. I have asked this in the past and never got an answer. Why do the CJs need to transport the ATV boxes? Why can't they be transported by the movers with the gray bin, booths, etc. Those boxes take up a lot of precious space in the car Tuesday night. This was particularly aggravating in this election with so many early voters and relatively few Election Day voters. We had eight ATV boxes and used only one and a half. We had ten ballot boxes and opened only two. Of course the ballots require secure transport, but do the ATVs? Or is it just that it is more efficient to have the CJs transport the ATVs? I was able to pack all the pollbook binders in one of their two boxes and flattened the other; that helped a lot. I also could flatten one of the eight ATV boxes because we had used all of its ATVs.
6. As usual the "don't open" ballot box labels applied at weekend supply pickup tend to get unstuck easily and even fall off completely, e.g., in the trunk of my car before I unload the boxes to my house. The Voted and Unvoted labels we Judges apply on Election Day seem to stick better. I have been told that all the labels are from the same stock. Is it just that we apply our labels more carefully?

Suggestions for the Future

1. See Actions for Remaining Proposals and Comments.
2. In the CJ portal, say who has signed up for classes. You already say who has taken them. Then CJs can help bug the laggards who haven't signed up.
3. Put the PO assignees list back on the PO website. I was told it was removed because it had personal data (which data?), not because it named the POs and exposed them to harassment. The assignees list was very useful, e.g., to let a PO learn the name of the CJ for the PO's assigned precinct. Then the PO would know to expect contact from that CJ and should regularly check if that person had been spam filtered. More on this is in suggestions about CJs contacting their assigned Officials.

Pictures

For some pictures and explanatory text about the 19-19 voting enclosure, voting equipment, etc., see the 11/5/24 album. If you are unfamiliar with viewing Google Photo albums, here are some hints. In particular, note how to use the "circle i" to view the full text beside each picture. When viewing the information, be sure to scroll to the top; sometimes Google Photos starts the information display partway down.

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