2016 gisco track: coupling gis with online time reporting to monitor and report vote center wait times by dominick cisson

Coupling GIS with Online Time Reporting to Monitor and Report

Vote Center Wait Times

Presented by

Dominick CissonArapahoe CountyGIS Administrator

Introduction

• Dominick Cisson, Arapahoe County GIS Administrator

• 25 years in GIS, mostly public sector, with a few years of private sector work in the middle

• Specializing in cartographic web development, database management, all things GIS, and now vote center monitoring

The Problem

• Arapahoe County, like many others in Colorado uses the concept of “vote centers” for their major election events

• Vote centers are not location-constrained; any voter in the county may vote at any vote center

• This would result in some vote centers seeing much heavier volume than others

• Centers within close proximity would often have significant differences in wait times, leading to voter frustration

In Need of a Solution

• In 2016 the Arapahoe Clerk and Recorder requested a better way to track vote center wait times so the public could make informed decisions when choosing a location to vote

• To do this required an automated and accurate method to report said times. – When Vote Centers got busy, election

judges would often forget to call in wait times, or misjudge them greatly

– To get a good, granular view of wait times would require calling vote centers too often

Requirements

• The new system had to require minimal effort by staff; no calling for wait times, or constant estimating of times by election judges

• The information had to be provided to voters in a simple, timely manner

• The Clerk and Recorder also wanted a way to allow voters to see the vote centers and ballot drop-off locations closest to them– With the wait times shown for the vote

centers, if they were presently open– With hours of operation available for each

site– They also wanted voters to be able to get

hands-free driving directions to each site if they so desired

Requirements

In a Nutshell

• Many facets to the problem:– Needed a way to monitor wait times at 25

separate vote centers, with minimal disruption to workflows there.

– If possible, take wait time calculations out of human hands, where mistakes could be made

– Make the wait times as timely as possible– Report wait times to the voting public– More and more users rely on mobile

devices for information… the reporting system had to be mobile friendly

In a Nutshell

• Even more facets to the problem:– The system also needed to provide the

closest sites to each voter based on their location, and the site’s hours of operation

– And, provide the user driving directions to the site of their choosing

– And again, it had to work equally well on mobile devices as it did on desktop browsers

Locating Sites

• One of the core functions of the online map is to quickly locate the closest sites to an input address

• Performing network analysis like this on the fly is expensive and time consuming

• To speed up the process, we pre-calculated drive time rings for every vote center and ballot drop-off location in the county

Finding a voters nearest site quickly

• The example above shows 2-minute drive time rings for one site. Every site was calculated out to 45 minutes


• And this is another site in the county. Every unique site (66 in all) had these drive time polygons generated


• The end result is almost a thousand drive-time polygons overlapping each other across the county


• With the entire county covered by so many polygons, it is possible to “drill down” at any location, and drive time polygons at that point

• In the example above, Smoky hill library is the closest site, 2 to 4 minutes away

• The next closest sites are also quickly accessible


• These “Service Areas” are setup as a GIS web map service, can be queried via REST in a similar manner to the previous slide

• Every service area is linked back to a vote center Site

• Every site contains its name, address, a link to the elections site info for it, its hours of operation, and other info

• Now this information had to be relayed to voters…

Developing the Online Interface

• The first step was to develop an online map that showed the locations of the site’s closest to users as well as the site’s operating hours

• Users needed to ability to look for either vote centers to cast a vote, or for ballot drop off locations to drop off their already filled out ballot

• The interface, when run from a mobile device, needed to use a voter’s current location as its starting point, but still provide the ability to search for a specific address

Online Map Application

• The application was designed with mobile devices in mind first, and would “scale up” to desktop browsers

• To this end, the interface was developed using JQuery Mobile, and the mapping back-end used was Google Maps– JQuery mobile provided the best scalable

interface for a variety of screen sizes– Google Maps was used for its free and

quick API, and its mobile-device friendliness as well

Demo

Find My Nearest

https://gis.arapahoegov.com/dev/fmn

Showing Site Information

• To accomplish the open/closed now trickery, each site has its open times defined as a JSON string

{'openHours':[{'dayOfYear':'310','open':'09:00:00','close':'15:00:00'},{'dayOfYear':'312','open':'09:00:00','close':'17:00:00'},{'dayOfYear':'313','open':'07:00:00','close':'19:00:00'}]}

• The above site is open November 5th, 7th and 8th, with varying hours each day.

• Using the moment.js library, it is possible to navigate the hieroglyphics above and provide users with useful information

Showing Site Information

• Each site’s information bubble also provides a link to get driving directions

• When the user clicks the link, the user’s original address and the site’s address are passed to Google’s directions API

Driving Directions

• Driving directions are provided as a fly-over panel on the left side of the map

• Pressing “Open in Google Maps” will pass the directions to native Google Maps where more options are available

Driving Directions

• On a mobile device, the directions tab will pass the addresses to the native map application

• On iOS devices this will be Apple Maps, on Android, it will be Google Maps

• From there, the mobile device’s native maps and location capabilities take over and the user can get turn-by-turn instructions to the site if they desire

DeterminingWait Times

• The second goal of this project was to determine and report wait times at vote centers in an automated fashion

• Based off a suggestion by the C&R, we looked into a software as a service package called TimeStation

• A few counties in North Carolina were using this system in a limited manner to check voters in and out of line


• TimeStation.com is a SAAS package that is designed to operate as a virtual “punch clock” for employees to clock in and out of work using QR codes

• The C&R is using TimeStation for that very purpose; so election judges can quickly punch in and out for their shifts

• We extended this concept, and created a number of “dummy” employees at each site to track voters.– They “punch in to work” when they get in

the queue to vote, and “punch out” when they leave


• TimeStation provides Apps for use on most mobile devices.

• Since every Vote Center has a pair of iPads, they have an easy to use interface for using TimeStation

• Using QR codes, the cameras on the iPads are used to quickly identify an employee and check them in or out of work

• Each vote Center is setup with about 10 “voter employees” that are used to track queue wait times.


• By treating a small subset of voters as trackable employees, its possible to use TimeStation to report wait times.

• Voters queue up to vote:


• A new voter arrives, and is given the option to wear a QR-encoded lanyard to wear.

• They are “checked in” to the queue by the greeting judge using an iPad at the check in station


• The voter enters the queue to vote, and proceeds to make small talk


• The tracked voter works their way through the queue, as their time in line is growing


• When the voter reaches the front of the queue, they are “checked out” by the machine judge using another iPad

• The voter’s in and out times are recorded by TimeStation and the lanyard is returned to the check in desk


• Depending on the length of the queue, there can be many lanyards cycling through at any time.

• As voters come and go, TimeStation records each one in the cloud.

• TimeStation provides an API that exports employee check in and check out times

• Using this API and its resultant report, it is possible to extract voter’s “working times” and parse them into wait times on a per site basis


• To calculate wait times, a local web app reads voter information from the TimeStation API, then uses algorithms to determine wait times

• The app can be configured to round times to a specific interval, and to either use the last reported time for each site, or an average of reported times

• Once wait times are calculated, they are applied to the election facility locations in our GIS using an ArcGIS feature service

ReportingWait Times

• It all comes together to display live wait times on the “Find My Nearest” app

ReportingWait Times

• Wait times are shown on the Vote Center symbols, as well as in their pop-up information

ReportingWait Times

• We also provide a simple table-based site for quickly viewing wait times

PotentialPitfalls

• What could go wrong, and what issues still exist.– The Wait times reported are a lagging

indictor. In other words, you don’t know the wait time is 20 minutes until someone tool 20 minutes to get through it

– The system relies on the vote center staff to be attentive enough to keep lanyards running through the line all day long

– If for some reason TimeStation and/or its API go down, no more automated wait time reporting

In Case of Emergency

• What if TimeStation goes down, or the iPad solution fails?

• There is a simple web app for manually setting wait times as well

One more thing…

• A late game decision by the recorder was to include a QR code on all ballot envelopes

• This code links to a special site designed solely to show the three closest 24 hour ballot drop off sites to the current location

• Using the same back end technology, this site provides a simple web-based list of three sites, all linkable to driving directions.

Technology

2016 gisco track: coupling gis with online time reporting to monitor and report vote center wait times by dominick cisson