coupling gis with online time reporting to monitor and report vote center wait times

1. Coupling GIS with Online Time
Reporting to Monitor and Report
Vote Center Wait Times
Presented by
Dominick Cisson
Arapahoe County
GIS Administrator

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. • 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. Finding a voters
nearest site quickly
• And this is another site in the county.
Every unique site (66 in all) had these
drive time polygons generated

12. Finding a voters
nearest site quickly
• The end result is almost a thousand
drive-time polygons overlapping each
other across the county

13. Finding a voters
nearest site quickly
• 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

14. Finding a voters
nearest site quickly
• 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…

15. 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

16. 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

17. Demo
Find My Nearest

18. 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':'15:0
0:00'},
{'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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. Determining
Wait 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

23. Determining
Wait Times
• 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

24. Determining
Wait Times
• 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.

25. Determining
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:

26. Determining
Wait Times
• 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

27. Determining
Wait Times
• The voter enters the queue to vote, and
proceeds to make small talk

28. Determining
Wait Times
• The tracked voter works their way
through the queue, as their time in line
is growing

29. Determining
Wait Times
• 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

30. Determining
Wait Times
• 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

31. Determining
Wait Times
• 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

32. Reporting
Wait Times
• It all comes together to display live wait
times on the “Find My Nearest” app

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

34. Reporting
Wait Times
• We also provide a simple table-based
site for quickly viewing wait times

35. Potential
Pitfalls
• 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

36. 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

37. 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.