Crowd Sourcing Polling Place Wait Times

Long lines at the polling place are becoming a thorn in our democracy.

We realized a few months ago that our elections technology framework data layer could provide information that when combined with community-based information gathering might lessen the discomfort of that thorn.  Actually, that realization happened while hearing friends extol the virtues of Waze.  Simply enough, the idea was crowd-sourcing wait information to at least gain some insight on how busy a polling place might be at the time one wants to go cast their ballot.

Well, to be sure, lots of people are noodling around lots of good ideas and there is certainly no shortage of discussion on the topic of polling place performance.  And, we’re all aware that the President has taken issue with it and after a couple of mentions in speeches, created the Bauer-Ginsberg Commission.  So, it seems reasonable to assume this idea of engaging some self-reporting isn’t entirely novel.

After all, its kewl to imagine being able to tell – in real time – what the current wait time at the polling place is, so a voter can avoid the crowds, or a news organization can track the hot spots of long lines.  We do some “ideating” below but first I offer three observations from our noodling:

• It really is a good idea; but
• There’s a large lemon in it; yet
• We have the recipe for some decent lemonade.

Here’s the Ideation Part

Wouldn’t it be great if everybody could use an app on their smarty phone to say, “Hi All, its me, I just arrived at my polling place, the line looks a bit long.” and then later, “Me again, OK, just finished voting, and geesh, like 90 minutes from start to finish… not so good,” or “Me again, I’m bailing.  Need to get to airport.”

And wouldn’t it be great if all that input from every voter was gathered in the cloud somehow, so I could look-up my polling place, see the wait time, the trend line of wait times, the percentage of my precinct’s non-absentee voters who already voted, and other helpful stuff?  And wouldn’t it be interesting if the news media could show a real time view across a whole county or State?

Well, if you’re reading this, I bet you agree, “Yes, yes it would.”  Sure.  Except for one thing.  To be really useful it would have to be accurate.  And if there is a question about accuracy (ah shoot, ya know where this is going, don-cha?) Yes, there is always that Grinch called “abuse.”

Sigh. We know from recent big elections that apparently, partisan organizations are sometimes willing to spend lots of money on billboard ads, spam campaigns, robo-calls, and so on, to actually try to discourage people from going to the polls, within targeted locales and/or demographics. So, we could expect this great idea, in some cases, to fall afoul of similar abuse.  And that’s the fat lemon.

But, please read on.

Now, we can imagine some frequent readers spinning up to accuse us of wanting everything to be perfectly secure, of letting the best be the enemy of the good, and noting that nothing will ever be accomplished if first every objection must be overcome. On other days, they might be right, but not so much today.

We don’t believe this polling place traffic monitoring service idea requires the invention of some new security, or integrity, or privacy stuff.  On the other hand, relying on the honor system is probably not right either.  Instead, we think that in real life something like this would have a much better chance of launch and sustained benefit, if it were based on some existing model of voters doing mobile computing in responsible way that’s not trivial to abuse like the honor system.

And that lead us to the good news – you see, we have such an existing model, in real life. That’s the new ingredient, along with that lemon above, and a little innovative sugar, for the lemonade that I mentioned.

Stay tuned for Part 2, and while waiting you might glance at this.