Washington State Elections – Voter Registration Interviews
4/13/15 OSOS Kickoff meeting
- King County suggested a list of acronyms and key terms be requested by/for all counties
4/13/15 OSOS 10am – noon meeting
Participants – IT, EIS, Voter Education &Outreach, Certification and Training (CT)
Workgroup – C*&T
Sheryl Moss, C&T Manager, detailed her workgroups responsibilities. They p
o Performs election administrator s certification and training online and in person. They also act as a liaison between the County and SOS by answering
o Liaison between county and SOS
o Ppolicy, laws, certify and election certification questions.s
o Election reviews –, similar to a performance reviews, are also conducted by C&T. (report card)
o Certify election administrators - 2 certified on staff required per county
o Training – online and in person
§ All areas
o ManageThe initiatives and referenda signature process, certification of election results, candidate filing, and some WEI and VRDB support is managed by this workgroup.
o For the initiative and referenda signature check, C&T uses the signatures available on the VRDB to compare against the signature on the petition sheets via the “Signature Check” application developed and maintained by Elections IT.
§ To help counties Use VRDB to compare signatures
o Ccertify elections and results, C&T develops
o County reconciliation forms that are submitted on Certification Day by all 39 counties.
o C&T accepts filings for all Statewide and some multi-county offices. They also provide candidate filing support and assist counties with their candidate filing weeks. They enter all filings into WEI Admin which is the election information management system.
o The Candidate filing – WEI system in May
§ Statewide and county
§ Assists counties
o 2nd Level Support – trickle down
§ VRDB/EIS = IT (1st level)
§ 3rd level is the hotline
§ Trouble shoot issues of law and issues with systems
- WEI database contains
o Office, election, county, candidates, initiatives and referendum information.
o Management tool – WEI Admin
o Redistricting/Reprecincting in not done in the WEI. The
§ County enters data into their EMS then requests a district sync so that their EMS will update the information stored in the WEI. The
§ State manages system
o District Sync
§ WEI – grabs county values and moves up
o Initiative signature check process – uses a copy of a portion of the WEI DBthe VRDB via the Signature Check application.DB
- Some data from the VRDB Admin portion canis used to help check signatures on initiatives and referendums. This data is copied into the Signature Check application. The VRDB is separate from the WEI. A majority of signatures come from
o Standalone DB
o Motor Voter signatures (DOL). Other signatures are
o Sscanned and clip cropped signaturesfrom the registration form. The VRDB only stores 1 signature, however for the
o Ssignature check – process it would be helpful to update and store multiple
o VRDB only 1 signature
- State Admin Codes (WAC) – review for additional direction to state/counties
-
- When Ccertifying an ertification of election the counties use the
o Reconciliation fForm that was developed by C&T. Some cCounties can produce the report from their EMSs. Come When complete, the county sends the report to the OSOS in spreadsheets. The report includes:
o Counted ballots and ballots rejected
o EMS - # ballots issues, # ballots credited
o A challenge with the Reconciliation Report is consistency between the EMS vendors. – Additionally, in some systems, reissued ballots may be removed in order to reissue a 3rd ballot which results in lost history of that 2nd ballot.system of reporting some good/some challenging There are
§ Challenges – reissued ballots
· Some counties remove and re-add
· Lose history
o Nno SOPs due to differing systems used by counties – causes issues in resolving problems and in training.
o Counties do submit standardized spreadsheets of results so election results are all the same.
- The EIS workgroup – develops creates federal reports (NVRA, EAC EAVS, etc) with some of the data from the Reconciliation Report C&T developed.
- Sidebarand counties
- It was discussed that the VRDB does not have a record deletion function – records – issue
o Ccannot be removed records. All registrations ; stay in the system forever and are a . Ppart of the monthly voter extract. Some people don’t want to be apart of any public list or on occasion, a non-citizen will accidentally register during their business transaction with DOL, so they cancel their registration, however they remain on the VRDB extract with a status of canceled.
- The VRDB extract keeps growing because there is no way to remove records.
o Cancellation – people want removed
o DB keeps growing
- PDR extract – Public Disclosure Report (PDR) Extract is a ‘
o Ssnapshot’ of the VRDB and is created on the last day of each month.
o It was estimated that End of month posted
- 2000 voters2000 voters statewide are in the Confidentiality Program. It is a completely
o Mmanual process and the voters are not
o File not ion any DB. They are
o Confidential
maintained by the Address Confidentiality Program which is Protected – not part of election division, but is a difference division within the Secretary of State’s Office.
o ;
o SOS manages outside of elections
Workgroup – Voter Outreach
o Tami Davis, VEO Manager, described all of VEO’s functions. VEO’s Pprimary audience is voter by way of the
o Voters’ Ppamphlet. VEO also does
o Voters and potential stakeholders
o Evoter education
§ Ppublications – largest is state voters pamphlet.
o VEO Ggets all the data they use out of WEI Admin including:
·
o Candidate filing info
o
o Info from counties or state added to filings
o
o C&T validates all measures which are then entered by VEO
o
o WEI admin by Voter Outreach
· For Bballot measure VEO (Binding)
o Ffacilitates measure writing for and against arguments and rebuttals, plus explanatory statement from the AG and fiscal impact statement from the Governor’s Budget office. VEO also helps
o “Plan Talk” for bill. at hand
o To enter the ballot measure into WEI, VEO will take the Word doc – and manually enter the information into WEI Admin, system and online and then publish. (wWord limits are in state codeWAC and RCW.) VEO
o State measures - state enters only State Measures and the counties enter their own measures.
o County measures - county enters
o State law - word limits included in RCWs (Revised Code of Washington)
o Ballot measure – ID in each chamber A l
§ List of legislators voting for and against is included in the printed pamphlet buty not available to enter in WEI Admin.before
§ Binding
· Advisory votes (Non-binding) are also entered in WEI Admin by VEO. These are special ballot measures that isare created
o Must be produced each time the legislature increases taxes. The
o Ttitle is written by the AG’s office, incluesincludes how
o Legislature - how voted, name, party, contact, and
o Governor’s office 10 yr cost estimate.
§ Presented in tTable format and is challenging to enter into WEI Admin due to limitations, however VEO
o Hhasve to enter what is provided.
o Action taken opinion poll
o Only for tax increases
· There are Sseveral types of Ballot Measures – Referendum and Initiatives CT – petition process,
· State level constitutional measure changes.
· Candidates
o After candidates file (using the Candidate Filing application) VEO - Ccollects photos and statements that are entered by candidates online using the Candidate Statement Submission application or directly into WEI Admin by VEO for state positions or by counties for county positions. Upon Candidate Filing, the state provides a listing of candidates who have filed via the “Candidates Who Have Filed” application. Upon review and approval of the candidate statement submissions (in WEI Admin by the state for state races, by the county for county races), the statements and photos then are published via the Online Voters Guide (OVG) application, which is filtered for voters into their personal OVG during their MyVote experience and presented as “My Candidates and Ballot Measures”. into WEI Admin. That Candidate statement information is thenalso feed in, info
o Feeds to WEI supported and county websites via the county-filtered OVG (Iframe to show the details) and. Part of MyVote. (
§ King does not use WEI or online system. There is an exchange of documents that are then manually entered.)
o Ballot order is State 1st then county. Candidates are not able to submit a new
o Ballot order
o Challenges – candidate statements for primary General. The statement they enter for the Primary is used in the General. and general same Most counties only
§ Wwant one statement for primary and one for general, however some counties want to allow a different statement for both.
§ WEI has the ability but does not do this. The statement
§ Eentered in primary and carriedis copied forward to the General.
§ CountyCandidate can only submit in WEI Candidate Statement Submission once, then is locked out. Candidates must use a token provided in their congratulatory email for access of their Candidate Statement Submission page.
o Challenges – 37 of 39 counties enter data in WEI Admin (King and Yakima (because of Spanish) do not use state system).
o There are several processes for Online Candidate Filing:
o Manual WEI Admin entry
o Or OCF (online candidate filing) – this is where filing fees are collected
o Online statement submission
o Local candidate – County enters (or candidate on county website)
o State candidate – 1 county only – County enters (or candidate on county website)
o State candidate – cross counties – State enters (or candidate on state website)
o Federal candidate – State enters
o
o The PDC (Public Disclosure Commission) is where all campaign finance information is sentavailable. There is a
o Public Disclosure link for each candidate in the Online Voters Pamphlet– CF – State and Local candiates. It is a Ddirect link to that system and . Alalso applies to measures. The
o Every candidate ID codes
§ State provides links to PDC pages specific to each candidate from the candidate’s statement so voters can view the d
§ Drilldown to where get and how campaign donations were spent.ds
o The Pphotos collected by VEO for use
§ Oonline were OK, however
§ Ccollected what photos sometimes don’t meets print requirements. Additionally, the photo
§ Problem – high resolution and lower resolution
§ Challenges – cropping tool and browser compatibility caused major issues during online candidate filing last year (online statement submission challenges vary, but persist each year).
§ Guidelines are given to candidates but do are often not followed and technical challenges with browsers persist.
§ Biggest issue in candidate filing
· Challenge – text with ballots
· Another Cchallenge –is that the candidate filing pages are not mobile aware.
· VEO also assists with language DB – SQL 2008 R2
· Ttranslations. Currently
o Yakima, Adams, Franklin Counties translate into – Spanish. King County translates into Chinese, Vietnamese.
o Yakima – has their candidate filing own system which; does more than required by the state.
o WEI Admin – has a place to save languagestate offers translations for web use, but only for some content. services Other content is hard coded and requires a developer to modify. Yet still other content is translated using the “Language Admin” application.
o King – Chinese, Vietnamese
o Translate anything – vendor Ttranslations are all done by a vendor and not by a computer (by law). Vendor has WEI Admin access to plug in the translated text. The language admin page shows the
o Interface with language admin – WEI
o English text and matching fields for translation. State
§ Applets only state level useweb pages use the translations to provide web pages completely translated into English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese.
§ Vote.wa.gov – has the additional language3 links at the top of the page.ops
o DOJ assesses the county language requirements every 5 years In the
o Future, we e – want flexibility to add more languages and for more counties and
o On WEI applications, user language choice follows user from app to app
· For Accessibility – Disabilities, the state
o Ffollows federal requirements. All voter
o Info needs to be accessible, including by – screen readers and all other assistive technologies,
o Bobby compliant. VEO
o Pprovides some audio files, some
o Can distribute
o Provide plain text files, some
o Provide Word formatted files (technical folks). However, it would be ideal to
o Eextract data from WEI and then not create all these systems.
o Systems are not compliant for state and county users. Again, ideally
o WANT – justa compatible solution to do all and be in compliance
· MyVote – challenges
o Promoting the use of MyVote this site; however UI/UX needs improvementis key. Possibly a UI/UX session could help. MyVote uses
o has a nightly copy of VRDB so that voters canto check for existing registrations. For submitted registrations, MyVote
o uses DOL for driver licenses verification and signatures.
o Online Voter Registration (OLVR) is part of MyVote. Submitted registrations are saved in the
§ WEI, sent to the county, -> County -> then once completed by the county it is sent to the VRDB as a registration. All
§ Updates and
§ New registrations are processed the same. In order to submit a registration online, the voter
· Nneeds a WA DOL# or State ID.
§
§ Public Facing
· OutreachVEO also assists Voter
o Hotline for the public and direct lines to staff for county support.
o Also some VR drive support through MyVote.