Black Belt Builders
Design-Build project delivery method gaining momentum, but will it benefit counties?
/ By Maria Sprow

IT WAS ABOUT 6:30 P.M. ON NOV. 7, 2006 – Election Day – when Lubbock County resident Teresa Rodriguez pulled up to the United supermarket store on North University Avenue.

Polls were set to close in just half an hour, and Rodriguez had already worked a long day. During a normal election, Rodriguez would have been one of the many, many registered voters who wind up not voting.

“I have never had time to vote before,” Rodriguez commented, while hastily getting her two-year-old daughter ready for a grocery shopping adventure. She put the girl’s shoes and jacket on and threw some stuff from the front of her van toward the back in a frenzied search for her driver’s license and voter registration card.

“I have to go grocery shopping,” she said, commenting again about the time. She had meant to vote earlier that day, but one thing had led to another and the work day had slipped by without getting to a polling place. “I was relieved when I heard about this,” she said, nodding toward the store, which was serving as one of the county’s 35 “super” polling centers. “I heard about it at work. I could have voted during work, but you know how you get to work and then you just don’t have time? A coworker told me that I could vote anywhere this time.”

“I’m taking advantage of it,” she added, before finding her license and scooping her daughter up and carrying her into the store, where a dozen voting machines had been set up and a line had formed as other last-minute stragglers exercised their civic duties.

The “it” Rodriguez was taking advantage of was a “Super Precinct” pilot voting program in which Lubbock County residents could disregard their standard precinct and go to any polling place in the county to cast their votes. In exchange, the program, developed by Legislators as HB 758, allowed the county to reduce its number of polling locations by almost half, cutting down on the number of poll workers needed to help administer the election.

A Super Idea?

When Lubbock County Elections Administrator Dorothy Kennedy heard about the pilot program, she thought it sounded like a good idea.

“Our goal in Lubbock County is to get voter turnout to increase,” Kennedy said.

“It was a huge success,” she added. “We had a lot of compliments about the fact that it was easy for voters to get to the location, that they liked the convenience of being able to go any place they wanted to.”

But despite stationing many of the polling places along public transit routes, an awareness campaign focused on making sure residents knew they could vote wherever was most convenient for them and local media support, voter turnout still decreased in Lubbock County compared to 2002. About 31,925 Lubbock County residents cast votes on Election Day in 2002 – the last Governor’s race election – compared to just about 24,500 on Election Day in 2006.

In total, 54,237 of the county’s residents (or 33.81 percent of registered voters) voted in 2006, compared to about 56,392 (36.46 percent of registered voters) in 2002 – and that’s despite this year’s highly contested and publicized race for governor.

Of course, success can be hard to define and determine. Voter turnout wasn’t just down in Lubbock County. Statewide, the 2006 General Election saw just 4,399,068 votes cast in the Governor’s Race; in 2002, that figure was 4,553,987. That means the total voter turnout for that race was just 33.64 percent in 2006, down from 36.24 percent in 2002.

Kennedy said that although voter turnout decreased, she still believes super precincts will have a positive effect in the long run – just not the first time. She expects voter turnout to increase as soon as residents become more aware of the program and the super precincts become a more consistent part of Election Day.

“We did everything we could do. It went very smooth,” she said. “It was amazing how many people would stop me and tell me how much they appreciated the voter center concept,” Kennedy said. “We asked and 95 percent of the folks that completed the survey said they liked the super precincts and wanted to see it continue in the future. We were excited about the results of the survey.”

According to the survey, 90.63 percent of the county’s voters felt super precinct voting was more convenient than the traditional model. When asked if they found the voting locations easy to find, 98.39 percent said yes, and 95.18 percent of the voteres polled said they would like to see the super precinct concept used in all elections.

But Democratic Party Chair Johnnie Jones, who helped plan for the pilot project, said she believes the turnout results show that the idea isn’t as good as it sounds, and that voters were inconvenienced by having to drive longer distances – or maybe it was something else.

“We don’t have the data we need,” Jones said. “The people who did vote seemed happy, but I’m more concerned to know why people who have voted in the past didn’t vote.”

Planning for the big day

Before committing to the pilot program, two of Lubbock County’s commissioners, Bill McCay and Patti Jones, traveled to Colorado to see super precinct voting in action.

“We picked up some good information and we didn’t discover any concerns,” McCay said. “We discovered a lot of positive feedback, which mirrored what we discovered on November 7th in Lubbock. Most folks stated that it only made sense to do it this way, because of the electronic equipment… it can identify your voting precinct, identify your correct ballot, identify that you had not voted yet. People really championed the fact that we were using the full capabilities of our equipment.”

The county also held several public hearings prior to committing to the project, with positive results.

“When you begin to speak to people about wanting to increase voting turnout, making it easier to access a polling place, it really was fairly simple” to get everyone on board, McCay said, adding that he believes utilizing regional voting centers will in the future have many benefits – improved voter turnout and efficiency and reduced costs and reduced logistical problems.

“From a logistical standpoint, delivering machines to 35 locations is simpler and less time consuming than delivering to 70 or 80,” he said, adding that in a traditional election, the county uses 69 different locations. “From a logistical standpoint, the more locations you have, the more potential problems you have.”

Commissioner Jones listed more reasons why the Super Precinct concept was an easy sell, convenience only one of them.

“It is getting more and more difficult every election to find qualified elections clerks and judges. We have a lot of people who have done elections for years, but with all of the new technology, some of them just don’t want to anymore,” she said.

Collin County Elections Administrator Sharon Rowe said her county had been interested in participating in the pilot program, but the timing was bad during the last go around. The county is still interested in trying super precinct voting in the future.

“We were interested in it from the get-go,” she said. “I am really excited for the possibility of doing this type of voting. During early voting, you can go anywhere to vote, so why not have that convenience on Election Day?”

There are many administrative challenges with the traditional system that are becoming more difficult to overcome, she added, including finding polling places for each precinct and making sure they are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“We are having security issues with schools, schools are refusing to be polling places now,” Rowe said. “There are some schools that we pay for security to come in, some have said absolutely not, they are not allowing their elementary schools to be used.”

After getting residents, organizations and the political parties on board, Lubbock County’s concerns were twofold: choosing the right voting center locations and getting the word out to voters not to go to their traditional precinct polling place.

To choose the voting center locations, the county commissioners and elections office worked with several other area leaders, including the chairs of the local Democratic and Republican parties and a representative from Advocacy Inc. Their focus was on finding big locations near public transit lines that were compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and were also well-known locations.

“We were able to work out the situation with the city bus, so that anyone who needed a ride to a voting center could catch a city bus. Anyone who did not have personal transportation, it gave them the opportunity to vote. That was real important to us,” McCay said, adding that 17 of the 35 locations were on public transit routes and all were ADA-compliant.

From a planning perspective, having super precincts is sort of like having to reinvent the wheel – everything needs to be rethought, from where the locations will be, to how many there will be, to how many machines will be in each one, to how many poll workers are needed.

“When you are dealing with the concept of a super precinct, it’s a totally different mindset that you have to get used to,” Kennedy said. “Everything is different, from the places you pick, how you set it up, how much equipment you are going to put at the location, how many supplies you are going to give your election workers. Even training the workers is different. Our biggest location had over 1,700 come, and our election workers had never had that kind of volume on Election Day before. You’re moving more people through the lines, and your workers are not used to that.”

According to the county’s post-voting survey, 50 percent of voters chose the voting location closest to their homes, while 30.49 percent chose locations along their work routes, 6.74 percent voted on their way to schools, 4.94 percent chose locations closest to their shopping routes and 7.58 percent said they chose a particular voting center just because they happened to pass by. Only .13 percent of the voters polled said they chose a location because it was along a public transportation route.

The public awareness campaign included working with local newspapers and radio stations, paying for public service ads and sending out informational letters to registered voters.

The county’s survey concluded that 42.39 percent of voters heard about the super precincts from TV, 21.26 percent from the letter mailed to residents by the county elections office,19.67 percent from the newspaper and 6.91 percent from the radio. In addition, 3.03 percent heart about the changes through their employer, 3.38 percent read about it in church bulletins or newsletters, 1.89 percent read about it because they received a letter from their school district and 1.47 percent remembered receiving an email from a civic organization.

While Kennedy said the election costs about broke even with costs of previous elections, she does expect any future elections using the same super precinct model will cost less. The county, she said, was extra careful for the first time around, and there are always more costs associated with first-year programs.

“We probably overstaffed in some places. We were in the mindset in the county that it was better to have more workers than not enough,” Kennedy said. “Going back and looking at it now from being in the field the entire day, we may be able to do without a few of the workers. …You initially have some extra costs any time you are setting up a new program, and Lubbock County knew that coming into this.”

Lubbock County Republican Party chair John Steinmetz said he was “extremely pleased” with the results of the pilot program. He measured success in three ways: cost savings for the county, convenience for the voters and efficiency for election workers.

“It was a good program to explore simply because numbers, state and nationwide, the only numbers that have tended to improve have been early voting numbers,” he said. “The initial thought was that this would make it more convenient for the non-traditional voter, who is exactly who we wanted to try to reach on a bipartisan or nonpartisan basis.”

The wave of the future

While Election Day went off mostly without a hitch, there were some long lines, especially near the end of the night – but that’s nothing unusual. The last polling place finally closed up at 7:50 p.m., though the day was officially over at 7 p.m.

“I feel like we hit above our target. In our locations we wanted to make sure that the majority of our folks got in and out of line in 20 minutes or less. We only had two locations out of 35 where the longest wait time that we had was 40 or 45 minutes,” Kennedy, the elections administrator, said. “And all of those people, they were told by a greeter, there’s another location three blocks from here, and they were given a list of the other polling places. But they were very happy to wait in line. I had just two or three complaints from people that had to wait that long.”

Still, several residents were seen leaving a United grocery store polling site frustrated and complaining about the long line. One woman walked out stating that she would try a different location while another said she wouldn’t vote this year after all. “It’s too long of a line, it’s too long, it’s too slow,” said the second woman, who stated she would not take advantage of the opportunity to vote in another location. “Guess I’ll try again next year.”

Most of those involved with the pilot program agreed that the concept is worthy of further testing.

“I would like to see the Legislature extend the pilot program and allow more counties to work on this,” Kennedy said, adding that she believes more counties would have invested in the project if it had been a different, smaller election.

She also said that once counties have used the super precinct method regularly, voter confusion would drastically decrease.\

“If we can get this for cities and schools and water districts to use, that is only going to cut down the dollars that they are currently spending to host an election,” she said. “Stability of the locations for the voters is the key to turnout.”

As of the County magazine deadline, the Lubbock elections office was still generating final statistics regarding Election Day and voter turnout, but proponents said the figures could be misleading, especially in the area of cost savings to the county.

“I will say I think it’s too early for either side to statistically say that the program was a complete success or the program was a complete failure. We have to run this program longer, with more counties involved, in order to determine success and failure,” said Steinmetz, the Republican Party chair, adding that he partially blamed himself for the decrease in voter turnout.

“One of the things we could have done was, as party chairs, we could have taken on more of the responsibility of getting the word out,” he said. “I don’t think either one of us did that enough to get an A. In fact, I would venture to say that without the pilot program, we would not have had the voter turnout that we did.”

But Jones, the Democratic Party chair, said she believed the concept is just not right for Lubbock County, for one reason or another.

“I don’t regret that we tried the experiment,” said Jones, adding that she would prefer a system where the smaller precinct locations stayed open and where voters could still go to any location to vote. “I would not want to try it again unless the number of locations dramatically increased. I think it would be great if the county would allow open precinct voting, now that everything in most places is electronic. I think that would be an incredibly helpful thing, but not to decrease the number of polling locations to do that.”

Having to choose between the traditional method and the super precinct method, Jones said she would not be supportive of super precincts.

“I would choose to revert back to the traditional system,” she said. “I think the county’s election office did a remarkable job, but it just didn’t give us the results we wanted, which was to increase turnout. And that was the only reason to do it, in my opinion, was to increase voter turnout.”

But Steinmetz said the traditional Election Day model has been failing for some time now, as parties, candidates and civic duty groups work harder and harder to get people to go to the polls.

“The same old, same old routine isn’t working. We’ve got to find ways to engage the voter,” Steinmetz said. “I think that we are making the right decision to try something new. We’ve got to find a way to get voter turnout to be stronger.”

Blaming the low voter turnout on the super precincts would be a mistake, said Steinmetz and others. Nobody knows the real reason for the recent trend of voter apathy – maybe it’s the result of the 2000 election and the Florida debacle, maybe the candidates aren’t as engaging. Maybe Americans are just busier, or more focused on entertainment than on the news. Maybe it’s a consequence of the media focusing too much on sex scandals and not enough on issues, or of being disenfranchised by the feeling that one person’s vote will never make a large difference, or maybe people are satisfied with the way things are and aren’t motivated to change them.

“We can’t control voter turnout, the voter controls that. But what we can do is facilitate and provide voters with easy access on voting day,” said Commissioner McCay, adding that he hopes the pilot program evolves into something more closely resembling what some legislatures originally believed the bill would do: expand early voting up through and including Election Day, with no break in between, making it more like a voting period, with the same rules and locations throughout.

“We could extend early voting so that we could continue using the same equipment on Election Day,” McCay said. “That would save counties money in having to take down all the equipment that was used in early voting and bring it back and store it and bring out new equip ment on voting day.”

And, said Kennedy, voter turnout wasn’t that much lower than in 2002.

“We were about 2 or 3 percent short of our grand total of how many voted four years ago,” she said, adding that the popularity of early voting likely stole some traditional Election Day votes, and the rest of the decrease, she attributes to a Republican Party mail-in ballot campaign four years ago, which helped generate some votes but was not repeated for the 2006 election.

While officials in Lubbock are praising the super precinct concept, officials in other counties said they did not believe super precinct voting was the answer to the voter turnout problem, or the administrative challenges.

Though the pilot program was praised during legislative session committee hearings as a solution for large counties, David Beirne, the director of public affairs for Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, said his county was not interested in participating in the pilot program, and most likely would not participate in future super precinct programs.

“We never really felt that it carries over well to an urban model,” he said, adding that the county worried about potentially long lines and having the technology needed to connect all the polling locations together to keep residents being able to vote multiple times on Election Day.

Beirne estimated that his county would have needed at least 300 voting centers open, and most of those would have to have been fairly large facilities, which could be difficult to find. Lines could be long, and traffic getting to a centrally located polling place could cause greater voter frustration. During a traditional election, Harris County has anywhere from 750 to 935 Election Day polling places.

“You could potentially expose yourself to claims of disenfranchisement, based on where you have situated your super centers,” he said. Of course, any time a familiar tradition is changed, there is likely to be problems somewhere.

“There are a couple of folks that have been voting the same way for 60 years,” Steinmetz said, adding that he understands that it is inconvenient to break traditions and habits, and it’s also inconvenient to make the person who lives next door to the old precinct polling place go someplace more centrally located.

Jones, his Democratic counterpart, said that may be what happened in Lubbock County – there were just too many residents who liked the traditional approach.

“It may have made it easier for some people, but if the cost for that was making it an obstacle for others, than I would say the obstacles far outweighed whatever the benefit may have been,” she said.

Voting, Super Sized Lubbock County takes part in pilot ‘Super Precinct’ program

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