2004 Photo By Dawn Majors/Post-Dispatch

Updated below (as of Oct. 15 at 10:45 a.m.)

Thanks to unprecedented interest in this year’s presidential election — and a massive registration effort by labor and community activists on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois — record numbers of voters have registered for the Nov. 4 election in both Illinois and Missouri.

New registrations have swamped election authorities, so final numbers still are being tallied. But in Missouri, where registration closed last week, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan expects that more than 4 million of the state’s 5.8 million eligible citizens will have registered to vote.

Illinois, with a population of 12.8 million, could see as many as 8 million registered voters. Mail and Internet applications no longer are being accepted, but voters may register in person at Illinois election authority offices until Oct. 21.

How many registered voters actually will go to the polls? In Missouri, Ms. Carnahan says turnout may exceed 80 percent. That suggests a flood of 3.2 million voters — 500,000 more than voted in the 2004 presidential election.
St. Louis is good at preparing for floods. So we’re inviting readers to help the election boards prepare for the flood on Nov. 4.

There is no magic to good planning. Election Days are an exercise in traffic management. The object is to get enough people and enough of the right kinds of equipment and supplies to the right places to handle whoever shows up in a reasonably efficient manner.

We have asked top officials at St. Louis’ and St. Louis County’s elections boards for hard numbers on these subjects:

• Where are the highest spikes in voter registrations? Specifically, how many new voters are there, in what precincts, served by what polling places?

• How do you plan to distribute your people and equipment to accommodate the predicted crush of voters? Specifically, how many machines, paper ballots, optical scanners, poll workers and judges are you sending where to meet increased demand and ensure orderly voting?

It may be too much to expect small, overworked election board staffs to bear the full burden of understanding the data and making Election Day preparations. Similarly, the voting public should not be left to hold its breath and hope for the best.

A solution? Election boards should make their raw data available online in a form that allows engaged citizens and advocates to follow, critique and participate in the planning process between now and Election Day.

This kind of public engagement has come to be known as “crowd sourcing,” a term coined by journalist John Howe in Wired magazine. The idea is that “the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few.”

To help in the process, we will be collecting data from St. Louis city and county election boards and posting it as it becomes available on the Post-Dispatch Editorial Page Internet blog: www.STLToday. com/ThePlatform.

That should make it possible for voters to check their own polling places, find out the number of registered voters and how it has changed from last election and learn what resources the polling place will have on hand. Voters then can offer suggestions about improvements.

Running a successul election is a complicated process that involves such factors as turnout, machines, paper ballots, the length of the ballot, available election workers and even parking.

For example, St. Louis County Election Board Chairman John Fox Arnold says the county is working to be ready to serve 770,000 or more voters this year, compared to 542,983 actual voters in 2004.

The county assigns its voters to 450 polling places, and it has a total of 1,715 touch-screen voting machines available. However, these machines can handle only about 215,000 voters on a given election day.

Other voters will be served by 4,927 three-sided voting cubicles in which they can mark paper ballots that are then fed into optical scanning devices that read the paper marks and tally the votes.

St. Louis County is planning to print 559,500 paper ballots, and although the races and names vary somewhat from precinct to precinct, the ballots are going to be long. Depending on their location, voters will be able to indicate their preferences on 37 to 44 races and issues.

St. Louis County is in the process of recruiting some 5,400 poll workers. It plans to have between eight and 14 workers at each polling place, two of whom will have basic training in voting machine operations.

They’ll be supported by a mobile team of 100 technicians. Official data bases containing active and inactive voter rolls will be available at each polling place.
Online at STLToday.com/ThePlatform, we have posted St. Louis County’s tentative allocation of resources to its polling places. As we get data from the city of St. Louis, we’ll post that, too, along with updated information as we get it from the election boards for both jurisdictions.

You can download that material by clicking here.

Check your polling place. Based on your experience, do the numbers work? What else would help? Can the data be presented better? What should voters know about the plans for their polling place?

There’s time to help elections officials and to hold them accountable. There’s time to help make sure this gets done right.

Update. Post-Dispatch Reporter Joe Mahr has been working on a parallel track in collecting registered voter and polling place data and, in response to a request, received this morning the following message from Joe Goeke, St. Louis County Director of Elections

Attached is the list of township/precincts, ballot styles, voting equipment and election judges by polling places including the registered voters by style as of 8/6/08 for the November 2008 Presidential Election. Each polling place has one optical scan reader. Also attached is the list of registered voters by township/precinct as of 10/12/08.

These attachments have been added to The Platform’s St. Louis City-County voter/election day data page.