Earlier this month, I wrote about the announcement from the City of Boston, Massachusetts that they are switching from paper to electronic poll books (KNOWiNK Poll Pads). I was worried about whether the city was prepared to handle the various ways the Poll Pads might fail. Otherwise, poll book failures on election day might prevent people people from voting or compromise the integrity of the elections.
Well, I’m please to report that from what I learned today at poll-worker training, my concerns were misplaced. Poll Pads have robust reliability measures, and the city has fallback plans in place which will allow people to vote, and only the right people to vote, even if the Poll Pads fail.
I do have a few remaining concerns, explained below. I also call out below one absolute banger feature of the Poll Pads which election workers and voters are going to love.
Why I’m no longer worried about people being unable to vote on election day
- Every Poll Pad has a complete copy of the city’s voter database stored locally on it, and it continues function even if the cellular network or the election department’s back-end server goes down.
- When multiple Poll Pads are in use at a precinct, they synchronize directly with each other in addition to synchronizing through the back-end server, so it’s not possible for someone to vote twice by checking in on two different Poll Pads, regardless of whether the back-end server is working. (It’s also not possible for people to vote twice because, as detailed below, although the Poll Pads are being used for check-in, a paper book is still being used for check-out.)
- The city has a robust plan in place, which I explain below, for how voting can continue at a precinct if the Poll Pads fail.
- Poll Pads are already in use in many localities and have been for years (Boston is a bit behind the curve in terms of election technology!), so they are stable, mature technology with most of the kinks worked out.
Boston’s plan for Poll Pad failures
Here a simplified explanation of how check-in and check-out at Boston precincts will work when the Poll Pads are working properly:
- A voter gives their name and address to an election worker at the check-in table.
- The election worker looks up the voter on the Poll Pad and confirms that they are eligible to vote.
- The Poll Pad prints out a voting receipt, and the election worker gives the receipt and a ballot to the voter.
- The voter takes the receipt and ballot to a booth and fills in their ballot.
- The voter takes the receipt and filled-in ballot to the check-out table and hands the receipt to an election worker stationed there.
- The election worker looks up the voter in a paper poll book, identical to the poll books that were in use before Poll Pads, marks them off as having voted, and puts the receipt into an envelope which is sealed and sent back to the election department at the end of the day.
- The voters feeds their vote into the tabulator, takes an “I Voted!” sticker, and goes on their merry way.
Here’s how the process changes if for any reason the Poll Pad stops being able to check in voters and can’t be fixed quickly:
- First and foremost, the precinct warden (head election worker) calls the election department and notifies them that the Poll Pad is malfunctioning so they can send someone out with a replacement as soon as possible. In the meantime…
- The paper poll book is moved from the check-out table to the check-in table and becomes a check-in book, just as we used a paper check-in book before Poll Pads.
- The precinct clerk (second in command election worker) moves to the check-out table with the clerk’s book, which has pages in it specifically dedicated to logging voters who could not be checked in on the Poll Pad.
- When a voter checks in, the election worker writes their name, address, and year of birth on a sticky note which serves as their receipt.
- When the voter checks out, they are recorded by the clerk in the clerk’s book, and their sticky-note receipt is put in the receipt envelope.
- Once the Poll Pad is working again, the precinct switches back to the process described above.
- After the polls close I suspect the clerk is going to need some assistance from the election department filling out all the tallies in the clerk’s books; it’ll be a bit of a pain, but it won’t be impossible.
- The election department will need to do some extra work verifying the precinct’s results; again, it’ll be a pain, but not impossible.
This process is definitely slower than the exclusively paper process we used before Poll Pads. However, it allows everyone to vote eventually and preserves the integrity of the election. It certainly won’t be pretty if a precinct has to use this process in a presidential election, but everybody who gets in line before 8pm will eventually be able to vote.
Great Poll Pad feature: helping people find their polling places
Because every Poll Pad has the entire Boston voter database in it, we will be able to look up voters who accidentally show up at the wrong precinct and tell them quickly and definitively where they need to go to vote. Previously we had to either suggest that they look it up on their phone, or call the election department for them and ask the election department folks to look it up for us.
But wait, there’s more… After we look someone up on the Poll Pad and it tells us they’re at the wrong precinct and where they need to go to vote instead, the Poll Pad can print out driving, public transit, or walking directions to their correct precinct or text a link to their phone. This will make the voting experience much better for people who come to the wrong precinct (and believe me, there are quite a few of them at every precinct in every election!).
Concerns
Any election worker can data-mine the entire Boston voter database
Before Poll Pads, the election workers in each precinct had access to a poll book showing all the registered voters in that precinct, along with their addresses. I don’t think the poll-book had voters’ birth-dates in it, but I could be remembering wrong. This was a minor privacy issue: bored election workers in a slow year could page through the poll-book looking for people in it, but there wasn’t a lot of time to do that, there was only data for one precinct, and paging through a paper book is not an efficient way to look for people.
The privacy profile for the Poll Pads is extremely different. Any election worker sitting in front of a Poll Pad can instantaneously search the entire Boston voter database by name, address, or date of birth. This is creepy and I don’t feel good about it.
Switching everyone from address first to name first
Election workers have spent years and years educating voters that the first thing they should tell us when they walk up to the check-in table is their address. Most people who have voted in Boston more than a few times know the drill and approach the table ready to give us their address.
Now, however, we will be searching for people by name, not address. We’re going to have to retrain every single voter to give us their name first. I can’t even imagine how many times over the next six to eight elections I’m going to have to say, “Actually, I need your name first, please.” It’s definitely not something I’m looking forward to!
How people spell their names is suddenly important
And there’s another, related issue that makes me nervous. Election workers pretty quickly memorize the names of all the streets in their precinct. We can quickly flip to the right page in the paper poll book, then scan the book looking for the specific address and name given to us by the voter. We almost never have to ask them to spell their name, because just hearing it spoken is enough for the amazing human brain to be able to quickly scan a printed list of names and find the right name in the book. Now, however, we will be asking people to spell their names all the freakin’ time, because if we can’t spell at least the first few letters of their first and last names properly, we can’t search for them quickly in the Poll Pads. I imagine this means that for people with obviously spelled names, the Poll Pads will provide a faster check-in experience, but for others the experience will be slower than with the paper book. I hope on average things will move faster, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
