Election Official as Bloodhound: Newby on Searching for Polling Sites

[Image courtesy of dailymail]

My friend and colleague Brian Newby of Johnson County, KS is in the midst of searching for sites for advance (early) voting locations in his community, and just posted this illuminating – and amusing – piece at ElectionDiary:

Advance voting’s biggest nemesis?

It’s optimism.

Remember, this blog takes the perspective of the election administrator, not politicos. The optimism to which I’m referring is the optimism of landlords that their vacant space will not remain vacant.

People’s Exhibit A is a shopping area near my home. The area, at 75th and Quivira, is well-located and convenient. The shopping center is huge.

It’s also been nearly empty for five years.

We approached the leasing agents in 2007, for 2008. We explained that we would pay rent for space and that, in November, we would be bringing in 15,000 visitors to the shopping center over a two-week period. Surely some of them would stay and shop at the bookstore, buy a pizza, or have coffee at Starbuck’s.

At one point, we were offered a tiny little sliver of a shop that would house only about 15 voting machines. We wanted a bigger space and were told that all there were plans in the works for all of the other empty storefronts.

We heard stories of the bridal shop becoming an Auto Zone, the grocery store converted to office space, and of all the shops immediately filled with tiny cottage industries. None of this happened.

When I say these were stories, that’s what they were. They weren’t plans. They were long narratives I listened to as explanations of why we couldn’t lease space.

Brian describes why finding suitable space is so important – and such a challenge:

We don’t have a team of lease negotiators, we’re a small staff, and we have to negotiate these in our spare time.

Often, this is a linear process, where we get a nibble and spent a couple of weeks trying to secure a site, only later finding out that the landlord isn’t ready to commit to us. We look for space that we can have mid-July through mid-November of even years.

It’s pointless to begin talking with landlords until January. Even then, they aren’t willing to entertain the idea that the vacant space won’t be filled until May or June, and that timeframe is much too late for us to wait hoping for a location.

Still, Brian notes that he keeps coming back to the local shopping center as a possibility – and encounters the same problems:

[N]ow we’re evaluating locations for 2014. We’re worried we might lose the space we had before, so we noticed new leasing agents on signs at the center and called again.

No return call.

(By the way, we’ve learned that “new leasing agents” often are the local leasing agents, who in turn talk to the same leasing agents we’ve dealt with before).

We even identified an old Kmart location that might be better. Alas, it has the same leasing agent. Best we can tell, this leasing agent’s role is to ensure the locations stay empty.

But this is our advance voting life.

And, just to emphasize how “there is no small stuff” in elections, Brian notes that his biggest competitors for the space he needs are – wait for it – temporary Halloween shops:

We’re nearing the time to get busy identifying sites. I stress that we pay rent (we don’t really have the budget for that, but we get how the world works and we aren’t expecting it to be free).

Our main competitor for space is Halloween. We’re often bumped by temporary costume stores.

If such a store opens in the tumbleweed zone up from my house, that simply will validate that the leasing agent does return phone calls, just selectively.

Or, maybe we can partner with Halloween stores (as long as they greet voters on the way out, not in to be compliant with state law). As the economy has improved, landlord optimism is likely to improve as well. There is less space available now than when we started looking in 2007.

Either way, this is not a theoretical problem; as Brian’s noted recently, his county is pulling back on the availability of schools as polling places and he will have no choice but to go out into what sounds like a frustrating market in order to serve his voters.

Thanks, as always, to Brian for sharing the joys (real and sarcastic) of the election geek “life” – and if you’re a landlord in the area, maybe help him out?