Travis County Commissioners Court
March 7, 2006
Item 20
20 is to receive briefings by the voter registrar on the requirements and procedures to respond to requests for voting history. 7 we have been asked to take this one up early and the reason is since this is election day --
>> is it?
>> by the way, those who have not voted early, should remember to vote today before 7:00 p.m. Okay? Number 20?
>> Commissioners, dolores lopez with the registration division of the tax office. With me dusty knight our chief deputy of the tax office, in a moment dana debeauvoir. I have a brief presentation for you to share with you sort of the process to -- to capture and create election voting history. Today is -- it's well-timed. Today is the primary election day, super Tuesday. And before I get started, I wanted to -- to thank Commissioner Daugherty. He's the one that really brought this to the forefront. He helped us on January 17th, one of his constituents had a concern about election voting history and why it was taking so long for us to deliver it to them. When in fact it had only been really just a few days. And it occurred to me after talking to him and our chief deputy that you all may not be aware of the process. And you may be getting questions about the process. You may be getting questions about why can't I get the voting history for my campaign or why your constituents can't have this information very quickly. Never been asked that question. So --
>> how do you define voting history?
>> that's my next point.
>> let me let you proceed.
>> thank you very much [laughter]
>> voting history essentially is the difference between the two is the county clerk elections division tallies up all of the ballots and they get a final total. We actually in voter registration capture the voter data. The voter name, the date voted, the place voted, that information by election. We go through a process of -- of capturing that information, verifying that information, and then having it available to the public for -- for purchase at cost. We make no money doing this. What I have for you is just a brief presentation about the process. You also have it as backup for our constituents to understand the process. Before I get started I want to say, too, that voting history is not statutorily required. But Travis County has a history of -- of providing this information dated back to previous 1991, the previous to the time that I was here. We do utilize current resources, we don't hire extra staff to do this, it's all with permanent staff. We deliver quality, verified voting history and from that anyone who -- who after we verify and all shows up to have been voting twice or more than twice, we are required to send that to the district attorney's office. And that is statutorily required. I missed the definition of voting history.
>> it's the capture of the voter information.
>> for all of the voters.
>> for all of the voters that cast a ballot. It's not the number that cast a ballot, it's the person.
>> so somebody has a question about a certain voter, if you call, and you get to receive a phone call, you can look into the list of all of the voters and pick that particular voter out and --
>> that's absolutely right. The information that is wanted so quickly after an election is give me the names and the addresses of -- of all of the voters that voted in legislative district 48. And how many of those voted as well in the runoff. I don't want numbers, I want people's names. It's for door to door campaigns, mailouts, calling campaigns, that -- that sort of information. In a sense that is what voting history is. It's not the tally of election results, it's who voted and their address, et cetera. What we have done for you -- well, it's not back up there. What we have done for you is sort of a time line for a primary election in red and a general election in blue. And I -- I don't want to go through everything for you, your handout is pretty self explicit, but essentially just sharing with you that a primary election we are dealing with two sets of poll books. One for the democrats and one for the republicans. We -- the day 1 is the day right after the election, so this would be representing tomorrow. We -- the records management department images all of these documents for us. We then take a period of time to image and then a period of time to review and verify the data. What we do is we verify the number of people who voted say per precinct, tallies up or verifies against, compares against the number of voters that we show in that precinct. So we are comparing an apple to an apple, if you will. If we are off, then we either rescan the book or we look at it one by one with the signature pages. That's the process of verification. If we find that we are off by more than 10 precincts, it adds another additional day to the whole process. But what we have found for a primary election is that we can have the information available to the public on day 13. We are talking about business days. For general election, the period is cut short because we are only dealing with one set of poll books. It's not a -- it's not a primary, it's the general election, that as you can see down the road here, the day 1 through 5 and 7, the information is available to the public in day 8, given that we get a good, clean set of books the first round. If more than 10 precincts looks as if the numbers just don't compare, that will add an additional day to the process. That pretty much shows you what the process is that we go through to capture and create the election voting history.
>> the -- question that would probably come to mind first for an average everyday person like myself that would ask, the general election has so many more people that vote. Information available to the public is -- the primary is 13 days, what would be the easy answer to that.
>> two sets of poll books, the process is still the same regardless of the number of people that turn out. We still scan every single page to pick up those folks that sign. When you go vote on election day, you are signing the poll book, the judge marks the name and that's how we pick it up through a bar code. We still scan every single page front and back to treat every single voter information. So we are dealing with two sets of -- of large books, if you will. Two sets. The general election is one large set only.
>> so is the fact that you have the primary --
>> two versus one.
>> democrat, republican that takes more time than with everybody just coming in and signing one big page.
>> yes, sir, that's exactly true. Right.
>> the next slide that I wanted to show you, some of you may be wondering what do other counties do. How do they go about the process. What I have done for you is of course on top I’m showing Travis County with the number of registered voters, we have four staff dedicated to this project and to sort of summarize in a general election, we will have the information available to the public in about one and a half weeks. Primary election, the information will be ready in two weeks, for a small election, we are referring to maybe just -- just a few i.s.d.'s are having an election for instance. The information would be available in about one week. That's just so sort of summarize how long it takes during our current process to provide election voting history to the public. As a comparison, you can see bexar county has all elections available in three weeks, regardless of large size primary, dallas has it available in two days. But it's raw data. They are not verifying it. If a voter votes three or four times, they are going to provide this to the public as the voter voting three or four times, it's not verified, not comparing it to the actual number of ballots cast for that precinct.
>> so it's not accurate and -- it's not accurate information that can be very misleading.
>> oh, absolutely.
>> that's a big deal because --
>> right.
>> that we had to explain is we need to make sure before we give it to you that it's accurate because the last thing that you need is -- is something to be inaccurate, then somebody really before you know it goes crazy over well, you know, this --
>> right.
>> none of you all would want to show up voting three or four times if it was just a mistake in the way the data was picked up. You really didn't vote three or four times, you wouldn't want to that to go out to everyone.
>> the vote early and often didn't come from your office.
>> not quite that way.
>> so do you -- when we get the questions, which we are -- are going to come to our office about district 47, district 50 there's going to be a runoff, we need to tell them folks it's going to be approximately 13 days before you are going to be able to get the verifiable list of who voted in the primary so that you can capture that data in terms of [indiscernible] go after likely voters in a runoff. That's what you are after, don't bug us until day 13 or actually don't bug y'all until day 13.
>> right. Right. And that was our intent is to get the information to you and to the public that -- that there is a certain process that we go through to assure qualified, verified voting history is -- is out and available to the public and it does -- it has a process and it does take a little time to get it done correctly.
>> after the runoff, folks who are interested in gathering petitions of people who didn't vote in either of those elections, too get a verified list of who was a non-participant.
>> right. We can provide indicate take either way. Certainly.
>> this -- this process that dee is speaking of is election day voters. Early voting we are doing this on laptops, it is kept up with -- with real time, so that if I go to vote in a mall, it's broadcast to all of the other early voting sites that dusty has voted at the mall. If I was to go next door and try to vote again, it would say no, sir you have already voted. I could do a provisional, that gets into another process. But basically saying you have already voted. Our early voting is real time. We are not having to deal with those. This is the process is just strictly the election day. Voter history being updated electronically during our early voting. So it would be there -- within five minutes after you have voted. We would know that you had voted. So this is just election day.
>> we are pioneering today election day, I asked david to talk about it. We are pioneering electric poll books at a few sites. I have asked dana to tell you more about that, sort of takes us away from the paper lists to an electronic qualification process on election day. Dana.
>> thank you very much. Good morning. Happy election day. Dana debeauvoir, Travis County clerk. Dee has mentioned that we started a pilot program are programs this morning to take about 11 precincts, very small, about 11 precincts what we are doing is attempting to expand the procedure that we currently use for early voting and apply it to election day. What we want to do is -- is offer when you go to sign up for early voting, you -- what you will find is that there's a little printer there, there's going to be a laptop there, so we can look you up on a computerized system. What we are trying to do is offer the same thing for election day. For our Commissioners court and our viewers, we need to remind everybody that this -- we are not talking about voting. Nobody is voting on a laptop. What we are talking about, though, is retreating -- retrieving the list of registered voters from a cd that's stored in the laptop and in sending that information back to the -- the main brain, the main data base of voter registration information so that you immediately know who voted. It is a security feature. We can add that security feature to election day, although remember election day you are not allowed to vote in anyplace but just one and that's your neighborhood polling place. However, after the fact we can realize some real efficiencies. These laptops that take about five minutes to upload the information, in comparison with several hours to prepare, scan and verify, when it's the old fashioned paper book election day procedure, if this laptop project looks like it's something that would work for us, that it would be applicable for election day, then we will come back to the court and say would you like to invest in laptops in all our precincts so that all of them can be connected to the voter registration data base, not voting, just the voter registration data base, so that we can get this information to voter registration and then they can in latonya turner it out -- this can in turn turn it out more quickly for public demand. Stay tuned for more details.
>> so for the -- for the candidate, party or person, about to run to the telephone to request the voting history, is there a charge associated with this -- with the providing this information?
>> yes, sir. There is a cost associated, it's -- it's internal costs really. It's just the cost to produce the data. For instance, if you buy -- maybe I shouldn't publicize this, but if you buy the full Travis County list of registered voters with all voting history back to 199 -- the primary of 1990, on cd, it's $73. It's very -- it's a very low cost, but it's the true cost of being able to provide this data plus a dollar for the cd or you can bring your own cd. It's very attractive cost for candidates, for constituents, for anybody interested in getting out the vote, doing a get out the vote campaign.
>> following up on the example given a few minutes ago, if a -- if a person is putting together a petition and wants to know who voted in the two primaries, for -- the person that wants that information trying to get folk who didn't vote to sign a petition, how do we determine what those two will cost?
>> we -- if you -- if you are requesting -- depends on the request. Some people want all of the -- of the voters in Travis County with just those that vote it tagged. So that would be the $73 charge. If we are looking at just a large primary election for just those that voted, it -- usually I think it turns out to be something like $32 cost for the data plus the dollar for the cd. So it just depends on how the request is made, most people want all of the Travis County voters that are eligible to vote as of, you know, March 7th with just the tagging in their file of who voted all the way back to 1990. And we have that for -- for folks.
>> right, but on the petition who vote understand the recent primary -- voted in the recent primary, right?
>> yes.
>> if 14 days from now the candidate is putting together a petition, primary, general and registered voters, if he has $100, the cost would be covered basically.
>> absolutely, yes.
>> all right.
>> that's very reasonable.
>> I think so, too. If you would please just help share the word that it takes about 13 business days, look at a calendar, roughly about March 20 primary voting election history for both parties will be available.
>> we will do that. We feel very informed.
>> wonderful. Thank you.
>> thank you.
>> I really appreciate you all putting this together. Because it -- thank you all.
>> yeah.
>> and it really is very easy to read and I’m certainly I’ve already made copies of this to get to certain people so that we will have this on file. So thank you for doing that.
>> okay.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, March 7, 2006 2:46 PM