Travis County Commissioners Court
February 19, 2008
Item 26
>> one other item today. Number 26. Consider and too appropriate action on the following request for the March 4, 2008, joint primary election did--election. A, creation of early start team. B, authorization for county employees to participate in and be paid for elections activitie.
>> thank you, judge. Dana debeauvoir, Travis County county clerk. I知 here to ask for help. Today is the first day of early voting. What is happening in the field is pretty exciting. People are voting of . It's hopping out there. We're thrilled with that. About a month ago we started a conversation about were we really going to be ready for the election. Y'all decided along with me that maybe we needed a little more going on so that we could take care of these voters. There are a lot of new voters, many of them young, who will be having their first experience with voting wealth it to be positive, something so that they will continue to come back year after year. This is our first time in many years where we have the opportunity to perhaps grow our base voting numbers of people. What I知 here today to visit with you about is I would like for county government to participate in a program that we're calling the earlier start team. It comes out of what the legislature did this last year to recognize people who work in the polling places and to also recognize that you can serve in your polling place in various capacities. You don't necessarily have to be someone there for the 12-14 hour day. There are other opportunities you can, we can make happen for you. Hour approach to volunteers for democracy is to start an early start team. The way the team is envisioned is that bee would ask one person who has some comfortableness, not necessarily technical skill but comfortable with doing things like hooking up laptops, making sure cords are correct, just some very basic hookup the equipment kinds of skills. If we could ask one person with those skills to go out to each polling place, one per place, early in the morning of election day, then what we can ask that person to do is to help do all the connections that need to be done so that the judge operating the polling place can focus on making sure all of the posted notices and signs go up, the assignments to the staff, calling people and getting them there if they are running late, dealing with crowd control. Many duties to get a polling place up and running. If we had a person to do that piece of it, it would only take them about two hours, perhaps less, to accomplish that and it would get every polling place off to a good start on election day. We're thinking that if they get off to a good start that will bode well for the rest of the day. Of course the story will be about how we did some extra things, tried some things to make it easier for what we anticipate will be a big crowd of voters that are going to hit the polling places at 7:01 a.m. On the morning of election day. The proposal includes an idea to ask county workers to help with this project. It would require two hours of their time on election day morning, likely in advance of when they would normally show up for work, plus a one-hour training program that we can offer at multiple times for them a few days before election day. What we're asking is for, our goal is for about 75 people to be willing to go to take one precinct on election morning and go out and help them get set up. What we also ask is that the departments in county government absorb this two to three hour commitment to the election process within their budgets. We would suggest that the departments could do whatever they please, perhaps, pay them overtime, perhaps flex them out, perhaps offer them compensation time, whatever works best for the department depending on needs. I need help and need to call on my fellows in county government to make sure that we take care of what we know is going to be a record-breaking primary. This primary in terms of turnout is going to look much more like a November general election, even potentially a November presidential election just for the primary.
>> tell me why it says 75? You have how many precincts?
>> I would love to break that goal, Commissioner. I just didn't want to put too much burden on you. I will take 175 people. Absolutely. You do have partners this. We've got already working on this project, we have university of Texas, saint edwards, acc, houston and amer corps are also looking for the kind of person comfortable with equipment who can go in for two hours on election morning. I知 trying to pull from all different angles of the community. I would certainly love to have more than 75. Trying not to be too burden some on the departments.
>> dana, can you tell me, since early voting has started and coming into the day itself, can you tell me the type of training that would be required for these particular persons, whether that be Travis County employees or whomever that will need to go in and deal with this situation? How many training is required? And not only that, but when will it be conducted.
>> the people don't have to know all the procedures for conduct of election or the way to necessarily open up polling place or close down or make sign knowledge--sign --assignments. We are proposing we can teach them in a one-hour class that sits down for hands on training, this cable goes into this box for this reason and this place for this reason. And here is how you check. We can do that in one hour. We can proposing we can run multiple classes on February 26, February 28, which is Tuesday, Thursday, and then Friday and Saturday before election day. At a couple of different times.
>> starting on the 26th, you say?
>> starting on the 26th. Evening, afternoon, Saturday, willing to do anything we can to make it easy on folks in county government to be part of this. Other thing is, it's exciting. The mood that has swept the county and for that matter the rest of the country is contagious and infectious and a wonderful thu to experience. Somebody who only had to spend a couple of hours might have to not suffer so much from the elect of the day the rest of our volunteers work. At a beginning, I知 looking for some people to help me with the earlier start team. I sent around an e-mail to several of the large departments last week. Explaining this program to them. I知 looking forward to hearing back. As soon as the court is ready for the thex step, I have a couple suggestions to you for how we might communicate and indicate how we are all in this together and who would like to pitch in and help.
>> .
>> [one moment please for change in captioners brahms brahms].. . .
>> [one moment for change in captioners brahms brahms.. . . . . The way that these people would be brought on board is that they would be employees, temporary employees of the county clerk's office so that they would be under my supervision and direction. That's the basis by which we would be asking them to go into a polling place for a couple hours that morning. They would be my temporary --
>> so if a person in my office were to commit to the three hours, basically, one hour of training, the other two hours, then if that person worked -- okay, the one hour on the weekend, two hours on election day, I may well owe the person three hours. But if the two hours on election day is part of the eight-hour day, as long as the person only worked six more hours, I知 in good shape. But if the person works eight hours plus the two, the person has worked ten, so I致e got to figure out a way to get only 30 hours for the other --
>> right. And it would depend --
>> they cannot receive payment for both working as an election worker and temporary employee of the district clerk's office and receive their salary for their full 40 hours at the same time.
>> that's what I知 saying. So those three hours, subtract from -- let's say we sub stractd three hours from that week, the employee works 37 more, that's 40 hours. That's not the same thing?
>> generally. I mean the better exception here needs to be is that it's outside of their normal working hours. It's okay for us to pay them for this work that they would be doing as temporary employees, but if that's a part of their normal working hours, then there are different issues that come along with that.
>> my people don't work on Saturday and they don't --
>> I understand that. But if you had someone, for instance, judge, that was an employee of another department, that their normal working hours would be from 6:00 to 8:00, then we need to address that 6:00 a.m. To 8:00 a.m., we need to address that separately. That's probably going to be a rare exception. Most of the employees, their working hours don't begin before 8:00 a.m. So we shouldn't have a problem.
>> okay.
>> but that's just a fact that we need to know.
>> but if they normally work from 6:00 to 2:00 --
>> uh-huh.
>> -- and on this day they work 6:00 to 8:00 there and come to work and work from whenever they get to work to 2:00, that's eight hours. You are saying you couldn't treat that like --
>> we would need to know about those exceptions. It can be done, we just need to be sure we do it right.
>> are you comfortable with this? From a payroll perspective?
>> charles vaughn,
>> [inaudible], normally when people are doing overlapping work like a second job, just like he said, the if you work hours you normally work you need to take vacation. If your normal hours were 6:00 to 2:00 and you are working 6:00 to 8:00 over there, for the county clerk to acknowledge that and pay it separately, you would need to take the two hours from vacation from Commissioner Gomez's office and six hours of work time plus the two hours. So you are paid for 10 hours a day, but you need to acknowledge that that is separate work from the work from Commissioner Gomez.
>> I thought we were trying to get away from dana because dana doesn't have any money, right?
>> exactly.
>> so in my example, it would be clear that I would either pick up the compensation or the time. See what I知 saying?
>> right.
>> but she's saying that during the training and the two hours, she's supervising my person, so for, I guess, supervisory purposes, the employee needs to be shown as a temporary for dana, on my payroll during that three hours.
>> right.
>> you can do that too as long as we're talking about -- you were to assign someone over there, you can do that. But as long as there's no additional compensation, like mr. Nelson said, as long as there's no additional time, that's fine.
>> dana says that's safe because she doesn't have any money.
>> charles knows too I was trying to find a way to make this as easy as possible on everybody and I didn't have to run a bunch of p.a.s. Information.
>> but for the regular supervisor making sure the employee only receives that same compensation, they would have received otherwise.
>> and that works.
>> yeah, I mean -- well, if we can do it, makes sense to me. The big challenge is trying to find I guess managers who will be supportive, try to help identify employees who can do this.
>> yes, sir.
>> the other thing that may make it easier is trying to get as many to work in his or her polling precinct as possible. That way you cut down on the travel time. If you need them two hours, it will take some time to get there and from there to work. So that may effectively become three in a total of four. But if we need them, we do know sometimes when polling places are inundated, I mean we don't want those computers to go down.
>> right.
>> and the election workers need to focus on getting people through there as efficiently as possible.
>> right. And you know how it is just from a personal standpoint, it's extremely early in the morning, you are are an election judge, you have a lot of pressure on you, people are lined up, it's easy to get rattled and nerve wracked. So what we thought we would do is bring in a fresh person to focus on this so the judge can do everything else, basically. Now, if I may make --
>> makes sense to me to try to help out.
>> thank you. If I might make a suggestion about how we would go about this next step.
>> you may.
>> I thought about how we would get the word out, and my suggestion is that the court agree that one of you, perhaps the county judge, would send out an e-mail to all of the department heads and elected officials in county government. I can certainly provide the language for the e-mail that explains what the program is, why we're asking for help and the way to tell their people to communicate with us so we know how many people we are recruiting so we can put their names on a list. We want to try to assign them to a polling place that's as convenient to them as possible.
>> if we have the e-mail, I don't mind sending it, but reference the action by the court today.
>> absolutely.
>> to some department heads.
>> if that's okay with the court, I can get you language that would explain the whole thing as succinctly as possible.
>> sure.
>> simple english language, john healy would say. Move approval.
>> second.
>> any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
>> thank you, dana.
>> thank you so very much.
>> the only thing I would mention, judge, on the last point that you mentioned about the travel time, that would be discretionary. There's no legal requirement that they would have to be compensated for travel time to and from whatever poll that they are working at.
>> he's right because the idea would be they are already traveling from their home to work anyway. It's just a little different workplace for that one day.
>> five employees just would draw their names --
>> I know. But thank you so very much for helping. I real appreciate it.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 8:09 PM