Things will go wrong on Election Day: election machines malfunction, ballot shortages, polling places inaccessible or loss of power, equipment is inadequate to handle the volume of voters, or a state’s voter registration register or database becomes inaccessible, rendering it difficult to check-in voters, among many other potential issues. No matter the cause, each potential issue risks tilting a polling place or an entire jurisdiction/constituency into a crisis that results in longer lines and wait time to vote. In order to effectively address problems on Election Day, administrators must be able to receive communications from the field about issues affecting voting, assign remedies, and track their resolution.

Participants in this course will be drilled on the U.S. experience. On Election Day 2012, in a handful of jurisdictions, things went very wrong. During his victory speech in 2012, President Obama noted that millions of American voters were forced to wait to vote for extended periods of time. “We have to fix that,” he said. Those five words led to the creation, in 2013, of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA). The PCEA’s mission was to identify best practices in election administration and to make recommendations to improve the voting experience. Commission co-chairs Robert F. Bauer and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, formerly the general counsels for competing presidential campaigns, brought bipartisan leadership to the commission, which was also composed of distinguished election administrators and representatives of successful customer service-oriented businesses. In January 2014, after six months of public hearings and consultations with state and local election officials, academic experts, and organizations involved in various aspects of election administration, the PCEA presented its findings in a report to President Obama and Vice President Biden. One of the major recommendations was the creation of Election Day Command Centers to track complaints and timely response to and from polling locations in order to reduce long lines and wait times in polling locations and provide voters with optimal services.

Election administrators have a variety of tools at their disposal to respond to problems on Election Day. They may have access to county or local government infrastructure, to local law enforcement, to field staff roving the jurisdiction to provide IT and other support, and to communications networks for coordinating between polling places, elections headquarters, and field staff. Taken together, these tools form an Election Day command center, which is a centralized system for reporting, recording, and assigning responsibility for problems and tracking their resolution.

Once information is received from the field, a functional command center allows those responsible for decision making to communicate with the polling place and the proper internal elections office departments to find a workable solution. The command center infrastructure should provide some personnel and resource management mechanisms that allow election office staff to assign jobs to appropriate workers, such as field technicians, and to track the progress of issue resolution. Resolution tracking will ensure that issues are addressed, and that election administrators are aware of how long it is taking to address them.