Framingham's Election Night Glitch

It was evening on November 7th, well past the 8pm close of polling places in Framingham, and the community was waiting for the unofficial election results to see what happened in the District 2, 8 and 9 City Council races. The link was up on the City Clerk's Election Results page at:

https://framinghamma.gov/3095/Election-Results

"November 7, 2023, City Election", but it was not yet active. In past elections, all one had to do was keep on refreshing the link and then it would finally become active, and the full results would be displayed for all the races, complete with all counts for all precincts.

But the evening wore on and the complete results were not posted till the next day. Partial results did filter out, but something clearly had gone awry.

Lisa Ferguson, the City Clerk, runs a great operation and is widely recognized as one of our most valuable staff members in the city administration. So, what happened?

The answer was provided in the City Council meeting, the day after the election, when Lisa gave a full update on the election.

She had spent months putting together the operation, as she had done to great effect in prior elections. As she explained, there are 10 polling locations, over 100 poll workers, 27 precincts and 5 sub-precincts, plus all of the permitting, police details, training, and other extensive legal and logistical preparations.

In addition, this election saw the first use of a high-speed scanner which can process 100 ballots/minute, as compared to the 4-6 ballots/minute rate available to this point. That speed upgrade is essential for the anticipated high volume in the 2024 election, where the high-speed scanner will be used to process all pre-election day ballots received. This kind of preparation, making sure the high-speed scanner works in a real life lower volume election, is exactly what makes Lisa Ferguson such an asset to the city.

On election day, all of the preparations paid off and the results from the high-speed scanner were available at 8:02pm. Those mailed in vote totals had to be merged with the polling location data to get the final results, and a minor merging problem was uncovered, which delayed the final results by 20 minutes. That merging problem will be fixed, by working with the vendor, in plenty of time for 2024 and showed the wisdom of advance testing of the high-speed scanner system in this election.

All was complete by 9:25pm and the final, full results printed out and handed to Susan Petroni, the city's Public Information Officer, who confirmed to Lisa and her staff that the result sheet would be posted to the city website.

That did not happen.

Anyone who kept on refreshing the election results page would have noticed this glitch. I kept on refreshing the results page up to midnight and never saw the final full-results page Lisa handed Susan. It was finally posted the next morning.

This clearly was a great concern for the City Clerk, as the whole point of her sustained effort was to produce the full results, and promptly let the community know what they were. In a very conciliatory turn of phrase, Lisa noted, this was a ‘learning experience’, but her response was to take control of publishing the election results from the Public Information Officer and have the City Clerk's office manage timely results publication in subsequent elections.

Here is the video clip, where the City Clerk explains exactly how the Public Information Officer dropped the ball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnv0EIKtDeg

There is no plausible explanation for why the Public Information Officer failed to post the results immediately after the hand off from the City Clerk. After all it is a simple matter to upload a file to the city website. It takes a few minutes to do that and activate the election results link.

A key observation is that when the Public Information Officer received the result printout from the City Clerk, at no time did she alert the City Clerk that she had any impediment to immediately posting the results to the city website. The City Clerk was completely blind-sided by the failure.

In the City of Framingham, we have many valuable staff who keep all kinds of services running in the city. Lisa Ferguson is one of them. If the city is aiming to retain its staff, they need to be supported and appreciated, not subjected to avoidable difficulties, such as happened here.

Lisa Ferguson enjoys widespread support in the community. It is up to the city to make sure that through tangible action, it is clear that the city administration supports her as well.

As this topic of making sure staff are valued and supported has surfaced in the context of elections, three other city staff come to mind who operate in other key areas of city operations: Shawn Luz, the Sustainability Coordinator; Kathryn Ronconi, the Director of Highway and Sanitation; Bob Tremblay, the Framingham Public Schools Superintendent.

All three have broad support in the community and are recognized as very skilled professionals. Yet they struggle with a parlous lack of city support in key areas of their responsibilities:

• Shawn Luz is severely hampered by the lack of support from the Mayor and at least 3 of the most influential City Councilors, in any attempt to expand solar installations in the city. How long will he put up with this before moving to some other municipality where climate change action of this kind is a high priority?
• Kathryn Ronconi has to know that with the city’s recently released Capital Plan for FY25-FY29, road maintenance continues to be severely underfunded at $2.5 million/year, when $8.5 million/year is needed just to prevent further deterioration. How can she do her job effectively with such miserable city financial support?
• Bob Tremblay continues to face almost impossible challenges presented by chronically late school buses, dire shortages of classroom aides for special needs students and students whose native language is not English, and a parlous absence of city support for expansion of pre-K to include all 4-year-olds in the city, which is critical to ensuring that we address the growing number of struggling students in a city whose demography is in rapid transition. Any one of these problems would overwhelm an average Superintendent. Investment in education is the solution: $500,000/year to boost bus driver pay by $5/hour; $2 million/year to boost classroom aide pay by 15-20%; $7 million/year to expand pre-K capacity from 300 to 900 kids with no fee. Almost exactly the amount cut from local education funding to pay for school roof replacements.

There are for sure many other staff across the city who are doing great things every day. If the city continues to make their jobs more difficult by the day, the whole city will start going downhill fast.

The Election Day glitch was bad, but it is simply the tip of the iceberg.

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For those who are interested, here is the full election update presented by the City Clerk at the November 9, 2023, City Council meeting. It is just a few minutes long but shows what an asset Lisa Ferguson is to the city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy7Yd3xgpw8