[EL] Line Standers --not just heroic but Hiatoric

Fri Nov 9 03:41:11 PST 2012

Jack -- You don't have to go all the way to Oklahoma to see this in action.  Come a half hour (sorry, in good traffic) south into Prince William County, VA where I also run a precinct.  

We've had electronic poll books in operation for the last two years, before which we also did the paper poll books "thing".  The electronic poll books have allowed us to do exactly what you've suggested.  Instead of having three or four separate lines based on the alphabet, we have one line that feeds three laptop computers.  

We actually had four laptops this election, the extra one at my desk so that I could handle any "problem" voters.  If the clerks couldn't find someone on a quick typing in the last name, they sent the person to me so that I could investigate further.  That also helped speed up the process.

Don't get me wrong, we still had a line at our precinct (2,963 registered voters, of which 82.34% voted) but it was manageable. When we opened the polls at 6am, we had 35 people standing outside the county building in the cold.  We had layed out a snake line in the halls of the building the night before that fed everyone to the polling place room for checkin and voting.  I positioned several of my 10 poll workers in the hall way for crowd control and had them constantly remind voters they needed any one of 20 different forms of ID.  Given the length of the line, they were encouraged to run home to retrieve the ID and come back, which a number of people did.  As a result, we had only three provisional ballots in the precinct.  My precinct is a Republican leaning suburban precinct where people commute into DC.  Therefore, from past record keeping I knew my heaviest hours were from 6am to 9am.  History proved right again this time, but we still had people in line just about the entire day.  The first time we didn't have anyone in the check-in line was nearly 12 hours later at 5:30pm.  We didn't have anyone in line when we closed the polls at 7pm.

For the past seven years our county has used electronic voting machines (without a paper trail).  The process of closing down the polls, creating a consolidation tape of the results from the six machines, and then hand-copying and balancing the statement of results (SOR) document kept us there until about 10:30pm.

On Wednesday and Thursday I've also been part of the Canvassing Board, where we take the tapes from the machines and hand check that the numbers were copied correctly, and then were also called in correctly on election night to the central computer system.  All this process should allow the County to report corrected precinct level results to the state later today (Friday).

One would think it's now rest time, but we're also working on our bi-annual election results poster which we publish for Roll Call newspaper.  That will be available on Nov 20, but orders can be taken now on our website below.

Hope any of the information above helps.

Kimball Brace 
Election Data Services, Inc. 
6171 Emerywood Ct 
Manassas, VA 20112-3078 
(202) 789-2004 or (703) 580-7267 
Fax: 703-580-6258 
Cell: 202-607-5857 
KBrace at aol.com or KBrace at electiondataservices.com 
www.electiondataservices.com 

NOTE: WE'VE MOVED: Please update your records. 
==============================================

-----Original Message-----
From: Gaddie, Ronald K. <rkgaddie at ou.edu>
To: Jack Santucci <jms346 at georgetown.edu>; Thomas J. Cares <Tom at tomcares.com>
Cc: Election Law <law-election at uci.edu>
Sent: Thu, Nov 8, 2012 2:06 pm
Subject: Re: [EL] Line Standers --not just heroic but Hiatoric

Jack, this exactly how my county ran their early voting sign-in, complete with photo Identification. They had five stations and were moving a voter every twelve seconds. 

Ronald Keith Gaddie, Ph.D.

Professor of Political Science
Editor, Social Science Quarterly
The University of Oklahoma
455 West Lindsey Street, Room 222
Norman, OK  73019-2001
Phone 405-325-4989
Fax 405-325-0718
E-mail: rkgaddie at ou.edu
http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/G/Ronald.K.Gaddie-1
http://socialsciencequarterly.org

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] on behalf of Jack Santucci [jms346 at georgetown.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 12:53 PM
To: Thomas J. Cares
Cc: Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] Line Standers --not just heroic but Hiatoric

Here's an idea I've heard very little about (and plan to write more on later).

I ran a precinct in DC. We had four check-in lines at which each clerk had a paper pollbook. Each pollbook contained one fourth of the precinct's voter registry. When a voter checks in, he or she signs the pollbook.

Sometimes the line for one chunk of the alphabet is longer than the line(s) for (an)other chunk(s). This drove voters mad. I repeatedly had to fend off waiters' insistence on my restructuring the lines, breaking up the pollbooks into different segments of the alphabet, etc. Of course, all of that would have been ridiculous because (1) it would have risked confusing my swamped check-in clerks, (2) would have risked having unbound pages of pollbooks flying around the precinct, and (3) would have ignored the fact that, every time a voter walks into the precinct, there is an effectively equal probability that he or she will enter any of the four lines.

This third point is most important. At 9 AM, people are irate about the length of the L-R line. An hour later, complaints focus on the A-D line. An hour later, it's the E-K line that's got everyone all angry.

The obvious solution: replace paper pollbooks with laptops on an in-precinct intranet. Each laptop contains the entire precinct voter file. No more alphabet-break-specific lines. When a voter checks in and e-signs on one laptop, the fact that he or she has voted is updated on all of the laptops. Super efficient.

I seriously wonder whether Ezra Klein (or many others with strong opinions on how to improve election administration) has ever actually administered an election.

Jack Santucci
Washington, DC

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Thomas J. Cares <Tom at tomcares.com> wrote:

I have doubts that any of the five ideas in the WaPo article Rick linked to would dramatically improve wait times.

I wonder if we could do something bigger, like just mail everyone a vote-by-mail ballot, and have the federal government fully subsidize return postage for all VBM ballots. Voters could discard the ballots and vote at the polls as if they'd never received them, or mail them, or return them to any polling place in their county.

With this, I'd bet less (maybe a great deal less) than one-third of ballots would actually be filled out at polling places, and that the overwhelming majority would either mail their ballot or simply drop it off at a polling place on election day (with the convenience of being able to go to one near their job, or favorite grocery store, and not necessarily the one in their home precinct - and not having to wait!).

I suspect the argument against this would be the potential for fraud (I'm not sure that's meritorious though; diligent implementation could probably prevent fraud).

There's a good argument for better early voting policies, but a disadvantage to early voting is that something may happen in the last days of the campaigns that could cause an (objective) voter to change their mind on at least one thing on their ballot (I'm a permanent vote by mail voter, but whenever I'm certain I'm going to be in LA County on election day, I hold my ballot until the election to allow for that contingency). It would certainly seem helpful if all voters had the automatic option to fill out their ballot at home and quickly drop it off on election day.

Thomas Cares

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Roy Schotland <schotlan at law.georgetown.edu> wrote:

We haven’t sung enough about the Line Standers, who stand among the all-time proof of how much people –as grass-roots as can be-- care about the Right to Vote. 

Roy A. Schotland
Professor Emeritus
Georgetown Law Center

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