SBE results page failure: all operators were busy?

As anyone who’s read this blog in the last 10 days knows very well I was, shall we say, unimpressed with the ability of Loudoun County’s Elections staff to get the periodic updates to the vote tally in progress up on the SBE’s results web site. One of the first things I did was to write a letter to the editors of some of our local publications. I’m pleased to see that the Loudoun Easterner and the Loudoun Independent printed the letter in their latest editions. That was very kind and I thank both of them for the opportunity.

I followed that letter up with an e-mail to a contact I was able to locate at the SBE in Richmond. That person directed me further to another SBE employee who, apparently, is closer to the issue. That person told me that the system of tallying votes is very manual. The figures come in from the precincts to the General Registrar for the county, which in Loudoun’s case is Judy Brown. My SBE contact said that the figures are either called in or physically brought to the Registrar’s location on hardcopy. At that point, my contact says, the either the Registrar or her assistant will then enter the data into the SBE’s elections system. Doing so publishes the data to the web site. The one caveat my contact had was that the Registrar is apparently not required to do so as the precincts come in. My contact suggests that “Lately, Loudoun County chooses not to post their election results until they have received them from all of their polling places.”

In a story at Loudoun Independent, Judy Brown discussed the voter turnout for this election and added some detail into what happened with the results:

Brown said voting at Loudoun County’s 66 precincts went well, with new election officers at many of those precincts. Some difficulty was encountered when the time came to tally the votes. There were 16 different ballots to calculate, Brown said, and the difficulty was procedural, getting votes counted and transmitted from precincts to election headquarters. Four phone lines proved to be too few and resulted in delays in getting Loudoun’s results up on the state’s website and available for viewing. Brown said her office will be working on streamlining that process and merging with the state’s system for upcoming elections.

Emphasis mine. What, exactly, that last comment about merging with the state’s system means is a mystery which I hope we hear more about before the next elections. The excuse that four phone lines proved to be too few is both indicative of the planning that went into the communications phase of these elections and a bit evasive as to the real question. First, all the polls in Loudoun close at the same time. By her own count, there’s 66 precincts. Assuming the precincts are actually set up with an eye toward how many voters are being handled at each location – in other words, they’re set to be handling equal loads of voters – then it’s hardly advanced math to think that far more than 6% of them will be trying to call at the same time. If even 10% of them get ready to call in the same fashion, that’s 2 of them getting busy signals, and I suspect the number was significantly higher.

In network engineering, that’s called designing a bottleneck.

Second, what would keep someone from entering that data as it arrived, instead of waiting all night for everyone to get through on the phones then count everything before anything is posted? I think Ms. Brown made a decision to purposely not post those ongoing periodic updates and that decision makes her unique in the Commonwealth.

What I’ve learned in this pursuit is:

1. There are laws in place purposely hamstringing the communication of elections results for no better reason than unsubstantiated fear, incomplete understanding of the state of the art of communications, and likely incompetence during previous efforts,
2. Insufficient communications resources of the types that are allowed by law are being allocated to handle Loudoun’s increased voter population and increasingly involved ballots,
3. County General Registrars may, at their whim, decline to participate in the ongoing updates of the SBE’s elections results web site,
4. These issues are going to be compounded in this upcoming year due to increased voter interest (and, thereby, participation) and the schedule of elections which will include a Presidential primary on 12 Feb, a local primary on 10 June, and the Presidential elections on 4 Nov.

Honestly, it’s 2007, headed into 2008. It’s time to let go of the fear and move our elections communications into the same realm as our banking, shopping, newsgathering, and personal communications efforts occupy. The SBE should come out with a set of procedures that mandate a uniform level of communications with regard to updating the results web site so all citizens of Virginia are provided the same level of information at the same relative rate as any other.

Ms. Brown says her office will work on streamlining the process and I applaud that. I will await the results of her efforts in this next election in February and see if the situation improves.