another one down

more election news, better this time. We got out of the township hall at 10:30, after starting at 9am. We pretty much consider this a win. CG and JM got really anal about the running page counts, after getting screwed by that in November. (note to self, put calculator in election bag, because no one else will remember.) I need to do some thinking and figure out how many ballots the four of us can process in a day. JM is kind of hoping that we can keep the Absent Voter Count Board down at four people, so we'll fit in the upstairs office, rather than using the (smelly, muuuchh larger than we need) fire bay. The office is just about as full as we can handle with four people and the tabulator, so adding even one more person would be difficult. (I thought that putting the live floor in the fire bay and the AV board upstairs in the conference room would work, but apparently there are Reasons why that can't happen. There's plenty of space in the fire bay to do a really nice well spaced voter loop, all on one level.)

Ran just over 500 ballots for an off-year MI primary. Still a certain number of people who can't follow instructions, and a few others who made a mistake and "fixed" it, rather than asking the clerk for a new ballot. The AV chair needs to get better at closing elections. It took her two hours to get everything filed correctly -- we ran the final tally tape at 8:10, but didn't get out until 10:30. JM and I were wandering around putting things away while the Chair and CG were figuring out what went in which envelope, and how to get the storage bags sealed correctly (to be fair, it's not as easy as it sounds. It's probably as easy as it can be, given requirements and restrictions.). JM and I were actually done when JM taped the tally tape up in the window of the township hall, and I finished making sure that all of the large envelopes going places were properly labelled with AVCB.

what we have here is a failure of... something...

not sure what, though. It's election nattering, mostly with respect to voter turnout....

JM sent out an email today, with "estimated" voter numbers attempting to explain why we should be able to lobby for the AV board to just be the four of us who worked yesterday. She's not wrong, because I think we could handle up to about 1100 ballots without running late - we'd have to start earlier than we did this time, but we didn't show up until 9am.

What I have trouble with is her numbers. She was trying to say that, based on the last gubernatorial election (in 2018), we'd get about 600 AV ballots in November. We processed over 500 yesterday, in the primary, so I see a couple of problems with her assumption.

• There's *always* better voter turnout in November than in August. Always. Absentee Ballots or live floor, there's always more voters in November, usually 30-50% more. (so 620-750 AV Ballots)



• Absentee voter numbers are way up since 2019. While that is partially attributable to the pandemic, Michigan made some changes in the Absent Voter rules in 2019 which made it trivial to get a AV ballot. It used to be that you had to have a reason when you filled out the request form ("I expect to be unable to make it to my assigned polling place on Election Day" was one of the ticky boxes, so the bar was really quite low) -- but the new rule is "you have to fill out the form correctly", and since it's the same information you'd have to fill out to vote in person....
  
  Using the voter turnout numbers from a 2018 election to predict a 2022 election without making some sort of allowance for the rule change is not going to be terribly useful. (we processed 1200 ballots in November of 2020; gubernatorial election turnout is usually 60-75% of the preceding presidential election, so 720-900 AV Ballots)

My feeling is that we'll probably get about 800 AV ballots in November. Unless something big happens between now and then....