For election office administration
No ballot of any kind. No voter registration record, no eligibility determination, no signature comparison, no challenge, no cure decision, no tabulation, no result, no reporting of one, and no observation of any of it. What remains is the office as an employer and a warehouse: recruiting and scheduling thousands of temporary workers, moving supplies to hundreds of sites, and answering procedural questions from what the office already publishes.
The office is small for most of the year and then has to become the largest temporary employer in the county for a fortnight. Recruiting, verifying, training, assigning, confirming and paying several thousand people who work one or two days is an enormous human-resources operation compressed into weeks.
Attrition is severe and late. People who agreed in September stop answering in October, and a site short two workers on the morning is a real operational problem that has to be solved at five in the morning by somebody with a phone list.
Training has to reach people with wildly different availability, technology and prior experience, and it has to be documented — because whether a worker completed training is a question that gets asked afterwards.
Supplies are a warehouse problem with a fixed date. Hundreds of sites, each needing a specific set of items, delivered and returned, with reconciliation afterwards that has to account for everything.
And the office is under a level of public attention almost no other local government function experiences, where an ordinary administrative mistake becomes a national story. Staff are working long hours under scrutiny, and the ordinary questions — where do I go, what do I bring, what are the hours — arrive by the thousand at exactly the moment nobody can answer them.
The office has to stand up a several-thousand-person temporary workforce and a several-hundred-site supply operation on a date that cannot move, with a permanent staff sized for the rest of the year.
That is an ordinary operations problem with an extraordinary deadline, and it is the only part of this domain that a vendor should be anywhere near.
What can be carried is narrow and mundane. Confirming a prospective worker completed the steps the office requires. Reminding before a training session rather than after it was missed. Confirming an assignment and re-confirming close to the date, which is where attrition becomes visible early enough to fix. Tracking a supply set against a site list. Answering "where do I go, what do I bring, what are the hours" from the office’s own published material.
Every one of those is about a worker or a member of the public asking a procedural question — not about a voter, a ballot or a result.
What never moves, at any tier, under any configuration: any ballot; any voter registration record; any eligibility, challenge or cure determination; any signature comparison; any tabulation, count, audit or canvass; any result or the reporting of one; any observation of any of the above; and any communication that could be read as telling somebody whether, how or where to vote. The last one matters as much as the rest: the office publishes voting information and this does not restate it.
And nothing here operates on election day inside any polling location or counting facility. The office runs the election. This is a staffing and warehouse function that stops at the door.
Sites short of workers on the morning — measured by count of sites below their staffing target at open, against the previous comparable election.
How early attrition becomes visible — measured by days before the date at which a non-confirming worker is identified, against the previous cycle.
Training completion documented — measured by share of assigned workers with a documented completion record before the date.
Procedural questions reaching permanent staff — measured by count of contacts answerable entirely from your published material.
Supply discrepancies at reconciliation — measured by count of items unaccounted for after return, against the previous cycle.
Permanent staff hours on recruitment logistics — measured by time-on-task sampling across the pre-election weeks, before and after.
any ballot; any voter registration record; any eligibility, challenge or cure determination; any signature comparison; any tabulation, count, audit, canvass or recount; any result or the reporting of one; any observation of any of these; any communication about whether, how or where to vote; and any presence in a polling location or counting facility. Nothing here is an election system, and nothing here should ever be described as one.
It reads and writes the office’s worker recruitment, training, scheduling and payroll records, and its supply and site inventory. It has no interface to, no credential for, and no read access to any voter registration system, ballot system, tabulation system or results system — and that is an access boundary rather than a policy.
Public answers come only from what your office already publishes, with the citation attached. Nothing composes an answer about voting, and where a question cannot be answered from published material it stops and refers to your office rather than approximating.
Worker information is employment information and is handled as such, on your retention schedule, in your systems.
And every worker-facing and public-facing surface is built for an old phone and a screen reader, in the languages your office supports — poll workers are frequently older and the population asking procedural questions is everybody.
Because proximity is the risk, not capability. An arrangement that merely had access to an electoral system, even unused, would be a legitimate objection from any observer — and the correct answer to that objection is not a control, it is the absence of the access.
So there is no interface and no credential to any electoral system, and this is checkable rather than promised: ask what systems the access model reaches and confirm the list contains only employment and inventory records.
The refusal on public answers matters for the same reason. Nothing composes a sentence about voting. It repeats what your office published, with the citation, or it stops. An office under this much scrutiny cannot have a vendor generating novel text about how to vote, however accurate it might be.
Worker data stays inside your tenancy on your retention schedule, exportable by you, and is not used to train anything serving another organisation.
And on assurance: an independent SOC 2 Type II attestation is in progress and no report exists yet.
The election administrator’s first question should be the access list, and it should be answered by inspection rather than assurance: which systems can this reach. The answer is employment and inventory records, and nothing else.
Counsel should read the boundary as a list of refusals rather than as a description of scope, because the difference matters when somebody asks publicly what a vendor does for the election office.
And somebody in your office will be asked that question publicly. The useful thing is a one-sentence answer that is true and complete: it helps recruit and schedule poll workers and track supplies, and it has no access to anything electoral. If that sentence is not comfortable to say, the right decision is not to proceed.
Accessibility and language access are delivery requirements for worker-facing and public-facing surfaces.
One poll worker recruitment cycle, measured retrospectively for attrition timing and training completion, with access to employment records only and no contact with anybody.
Retrospective and employment-only is the narrowest possible start, and it is the right one here. It produces the attrition curve — when in the cycle people stopped confirming — which is the number that determines whether sites are short on the morning.
Most offices know their final shortfall and not the shape of the curve that produced it. That finding belongs to the office whatever happens next, and acting on it may not require a vendor at all.
If it continues, the first grant covers confirmation reminders on one cycle, with the complete refusal list in the scope document and the public one-sentence answer agreed before anything runs.
That is a reasonable position and it may be the right one for your office. The distinction this page rests on is that recruiting and paying temporary workers and moving boxes to sites is not an election function — it is employment and logistics that happens to have an immovable date. If the distinction does not hold for your office or your public, do not proceed. The cost of the objection is far higher than the value of the logistics.
By inspecting the access list rather than accepting a sentence. There is no interface and no credential to any voter registration, ballot, tabulation or results system, and that is a property of what was provisioned rather than a setting somebody could change. Ask for the complete list of systems reachable and confirm it contains only employment and inventory records. If a vendor cannot produce that list, that is the answer.
They might, and that is why the one-sentence public answer is agreed before anything runs rather than composed under pressure afterwards: it helps recruit and schedule poll workers and track supplies, and it has no access to anything electoral. If your administrator is not comfortable saying that sentence in public, the right decision is not to proceed — and we would rather you reached that conclusion here than after an agreement.
Then it has to work on a phone they already have, in large text, with a screen reader, and with a phone number that reaches a person — which is a delivery requirement rather than a nice-to-have here. The measurement to watch is confirmation rate by channel: if the new channel confirms worse than a phone call did, the phone call was better and the honest answer is to keep it.