TTV Election Event Management Data Model White Paper
From Trust The Vote
Contents |
Introduction
One part of the TTV Election Manager is a module that performs "election event management," a part of election preparation activity that leads the production of ballots. Data management of election events is not onerously complex, but can be difficult to understand because of the variety of election administration terminology and practice around the seemingly simple matter of recording the contests and candidates in an election.
To specify the functions of the TVV election event management module, we first provide several terms, definitions, examples, and observations, and then summarize the workflow and results of election event management activities.
One goal of this exposition is to define prose requirements for the data model (or the portion of it related of election events) of the TTV Election Manager.
Status
The terminology used here is fairly conventional for many (though far from most) U.S. elections organizations, and needs to be extended to apply more broadly to a wider range of U.S. election administration.
The descriptions of election event management are at present limited to matters related to production of paper ballots.
Definitions
The following definitions are intended to frame both the data model and the concept of operations for TTV election event management. One very important framing concept is that election event management is mainly performed at the level of a local election jurisdiction, such as a county or township; that is election officials are working to produce the ballots for the election in that jurisdiction. Of course, these activities can be carried out solely by election officials of that jurisdiction, or by state-level officials, or a mix. But for purposes of defining the election event workflow, the definitions are intended to describe the activities of a single jurisdiction.
1. Election administration is a complex set of work processes performed by election officials to manage the human, physical, and technological infrastructure for conducting elections. Election administration includes voter records management, election management, the use of voting systems to conduct elections, and a variety of activities performed for a given election after voting is complete, including canvass, reporting, audit, election certification.
2. Election management is a complex set of work processes for preparing for an election, and performing some administrative tasks between elections, but typically excluding voter records management.
3. An election management system (EMS) is the term used to describe the I.T. infrastructure for conducting election management activities. The TTV Election Manager is an EMS.
4. One part of election management, and typically part of an EMS, is "election event management" which is the construction of the ballot-related information that defines a particular election: contests, questions, candidates, etc. Viewed purely as an information management activity, election event management may be considered as distinct from related parts of election management, such as the work process for handling candidate applications in order to determine whether the applicant should be a candidate in an upcoming election.
5. Election event management is partly defined by the relations between a number of legal and organizational entities (e.g., counties, school districts), and corresponding EMS data objects.
6. One such entity is an election jurisdiction, for example, a county in which a county elections board has the responsibility for conducting elections. Counties, parishes, townships, unified city/county districts, are all typical examples of an election jurisdiction.
7. Another such entity is an electoral district, which is a legal and administrative abstraction that defines the geographic extent of the population who are entitled to vote on an elected office or offices. A district may have a single "office", such as a federal congressional district. A district may have multiple offices such as a town council, and town mayor. A district may have the ability to conduct ballot questions, such as a county referendum on county sales taxes. A district may have both offices and potential questions, or only an office or offices (federal congressional district), or only the ability to conduct ballot questions (a local fire district in which commissioners are appointed rather than elected, but for which voter approval is required for appropriations limit changes).
8. An election jurisdiction has the responsibility for conducting elections for a specific set of districts. For a given jurisdiction, some of the districts are entirely within the jurisdiction, such as a town in a county. Some districts include all or parts of multiple jurisdictions, such as a federal congressional district that spans multiple counties. Some districts may be the same government body as the jurisdiction itself, such as an election jurisdiction that is a county that has an elected county commission. Regardless of these various cases, each jurisdiction has a specific district-set of districts, each of which can create one or more ballot items (contests for an office, or questions) for a given election.
9. Within a jurisdiction, the various districts overlap to create a set of geographic areas with particular property: within that area, every registered voter is entitled to vote on ballots items from the exact same set of districts, or rather the same subset of the jurisdiction's district-set. In an ideal case, each of these areas is the unit of election operations, the "precinct". In some jurisdictions, however, some precincts are the union of multiple such areas, each of which are called "precinct splits."
10. As an example of precinct-splits, in some counties the precincts are defined by the overlaps of every type of district (federal, state, local) except one - fire district. In practice, fire districts rarely generate a ballot item for any election. If precincts were defined down to the level of fire districts, the number of precincts would more than double, with many cases of adjacent precincts having the same ballot items for almost every election.
With the use of precinct-splits, however, the number and size of precincts is more manageable. In each precinct, in most elections, every voter votes the same ballot (or in the case of primary elections, one of the same set of party-specific ballots). On rare occasions in which a particular fire district creates a ballot item, one or more precincts (each of which is included in the geographic extent of the fire district) will have two ballots, one for the voters in the precinct who are in the fire district with the ballot item, and one for the voters in the precinct who are not in that fire district.
11. The unit of election event management is typically a jurisdiction such as a county.
12. Each county has a district-set and a set of precincts. Each district encompasses a number of precincts, and each precinct is associated with a number of districts. These precinct/district relations (including the definitions of precinct-splits) are a key part of the background of election event management for that county.
For clarity, it is important to note one asymmetry: one county's defined precinct/district relations are complete for the whole county and all its precincts; but one county's district/precinct relations are often incomplete for the districts in the county. The incompleteness results from the common case where a county is in a Federal congressional district that spans multiple counties. But for one county's election event management, it is not required to account for the larger extent of such multi-county districts.
13. A separate part of election management (separate from election event management) is the management of changes to the definitions of districts and precincts, and the offices in districts.
14. Election event management is essentially the management of ballot items for an upcoming election. Any district may contribute a ballot item, or items, to a given election, once the election has been called for a specific purpose. Each ballot item is either a question for the voters of the district (e.g., a town referendum), or a contest for an office that is part of the district (e.g., town mayor).
15. Ballot items that are questions consist of the question itself, but no candidates - just choices ("yes" or "no", for example).
16. Ballot items that are contest include one or more candidates, each of which may have jurisdiction-dependent attributes such as political party affiliation or occupation.
17. In an EMS that automates the management of the election events, the following list of data objects is essential, each corresponding to some part of the work process of defining election events:
- election jurisdiction - the jurisdiction which is conducting an election
- district-set - the districts that comprise the election jurisdiction
- district - one member of the district-set* precinct-list - the list of precincts defined by the district-set
- precinct - one member of the precinct-list
- precinct-split - an optional component of precinct
- office - an elected office that is associated with one district
- contest - a ballot item for a contest for a specific office
- question - a ballot item for a ballot question for a specific district
- candidate - a contestant for a given office
- candidate-attribute - information about a candidate
18. The election-event object has a number of attributes (date, title, etc.) but consists mainly of contests. For the purposes of an EMS, each election is specific to a particular jurisdiction. Of course, in most elections, several jurisdictions conduct an election at the same time, and share some duties -- for example, in a state-wide election, each county conducts contests for state-wide offices.
19. These data objects have the following relations that are separate from an election per se, but which may change in definition (rarely) from one election to another:
- an election jurisdiction has a district set
- a district-set has a list of districts
- a district has a list of precincts that are part of the district
- a precinct as a list of districts of which it is a part
- a precinct has a list of precinct-splits
- a precinct-split has a list of districts (typically one) of which it is a part, in addition those defined in the parent precinct
- a district has a set of offices
The precinct-district relations are equivalently defined by both: the set of districts and their precincts; the list of precincts and their districts.
20. These data objects have the following relations that are specific to an election:
- an election has a number of ballot-items that are either contests or questions
- each contest is for a specific office of a specific district
- each question is for a specific district
- each contest has one or more candidates
21. For a given election, each precinct (and if relevant precinct-split) has a specific subset of the contests and questions in a given election. These ballot items are exactly those associated with the districts of which the precinct is a part.
22. A "ballot configuration" is one precinct's (or precinct-split's) set of contests and questions for a given election, including the various components such as a candidates and candidate attributes.
23. Each ballot configuration is represented as one or more "ballot styles". In a simple election, each ballot configuration is represented by one ballot style; however each ballot style may be rendered in more than one language (bi-lingual ballots) or on multiple district languages (uni-lingual ballots for each of multiple languages). In primary elections, the ballot configuration may be represented in multiple ballot styles, one for each political party, and one for voters not affiliated with a party.
24. Each ballot style, and each distinct linguistic rendering of each ballot style, is represented in a distinct ballot. Each ballot may be represented in one or more ways such as paper, audio (telephone based voting), video, or audio-video.
25. At the conclusion of an election event management process for preparing for a given election, the jurisdiction has a "master list" of all the ballot items that will be presented to the voters, and which the jurisdiction election authorities will collect votes and tabulate election results.
26. At the conclusion of an election event management process for preparing for a given election, the jurisdiction has a set of ballot configuration for the full set of precincts in the jurisdiction. Each ballot configuration is a subset of the master list. The set of ballot configurations can be compiled via the following process:
- For each precinct in the precinct-list of the jurisdiction, create an empty ballot configuration
- For each district of which the precinct is a part, if the district has an ballot items on the master list, add them to the ballot configuration of the precinct.
Where precincts are split, a similar process is followed, except that if all the splits in a precinct have the same set of ballot items, then there is only one ballot configuration for the precinct -- rather than having identical ballot configurations for each split.
27. Following the election event management process for preparing for a given election, each ballot configuration then must be represented in one or more ballot styles. "Ballot design" is term sometimes used to define process of creating ballot styles from ballot configurations.
Election Event Management Workflow
With the above definitions and examples, we can describe in fairly simple terms the real-world workflows that can be automated with the use of the TTV Election Manager's election event module. All of these actions occur between the time an election is called, and the deadline for preparation of ballots.
Prior to election event management per se are potentially several processes related to requests and notifications that can, if approved, lead to the create of ballot items, including:
- district notifications of office vacancy, office term, or request for one or more district questions for the ballot of an upcoming election;
- citizen requests for candidacy for office;
- citizen petition for a ballot question, legislative notification of ballot question, and other jurisdiction-specific mechanisms for notification of ballot questions.
The workflow for intake and approval or rejection of these potential ballot items is not part of election event management per se, and can be entirely offline, or automated in an external IT system, or automated in another module of the TTV Election Manager.
Election Event Definition
The very first step in the election event manager occurs when an election is called - the creation in the manager of a new election event, and the data entry of the pertinent attributes of the election: title, type, date, etc. Then, whenever any potential ballot items is approved for the ballot, a question or contest is added to the election event, or a candidate is added to an existing contest. Each question is created from an existing district that is already defined in the election event manager, and is given a title and ballot text. Each contest is created from an existing office of an existing district, and inherits from the office the title of the contest, the election method, and other attributes. Contests can be modified by adding a candidate (with a name and other attributes), deleting a candidate, or modifying some candidate attributes. Questions can be modified by changing title or ballot text.
Some ballot item's text attributes are actually sets of parallel attributes with text in each of several supported languages.
These extensions or modifications of the election event are handled by data entry of users with the appropriate privileges in the election event manager module. However, at some point in time, a deadline is reached when ballot items may not be modified, because ballots must be prepared and printed in time to meet the ballot distribution deadline. At that point, if all translations into all required languages have not been already provided, then they must be provided by updating the appropriate attributes of the various ballot items that are part of the election event. Then the election event is completely defined.
Ballot Configuration Definition
The next step is to define each precinct's subset of the ballot items in the election event. This is an automatic step that, however, depends on precinct and district definitions (including precinct/district relations) that have been previously imported in to the system. Management of changes over time to districts and precincts is a function that can automated in an external IT system (with data exported from it and imported into the TTV Election Manager), or automated in another module of the TTV Election Manager. Using the precinct/district data, ballot configuration definition is a single transaction in the TTV Election Manager.
After doing so, typical practice would be manual review of each ballot configuration using a compact, easy-to-navigate representation provided by the TTV Election Manager. If potential errors are found in any ballot item, then the error and correction must be approved, the corrections made, and the ballot configurations updated. After all the ballot configurations are approved, the last step of election event management is a single transaction to collect up all the ballot configurations (and their ballot items and attributes) into a body of data that is used to automatically generate printable ballot images.
Ballot Generation
Ballot generation is the function of a separate TTV System component, the Ballot Design Studio (BDS). Notionally, ballot generation is fully automatic by combining all the ballot configuration data with pre-existing ballot layout templates. However, much of the work of the BDS is in the creation of those templates. In a given election cycle, some ballot design may occur in parallel with election event definition, to create or update the templates needed for the election.
Summary
Election event definition is performed by one module of the TTV Election Manager, possibly in conjunction with other modules and/or via data interoperability (using common data formats) with other IT systems. At present, the Election Manager's functions are defined only for the paper ballot preparation process described here; ongoing work will extend it to the preparation of audio and video elements of ballot items, and the construction of the data that defines an electronic ballot for the TTV Accessible Ballot Marker, or for any other ballot marking device that may share the common data formats for such e-ballots. Likewise, the TTV Election Manager is intended for use with the Ballot Design Studio, but can also be used to export all of the ballot configuration data for other aprroaches to the preparation of ballots.
