10:32 p.m. - 2004-06-12
Suspicion
My assistant picked me up this morning. I filled him in on the past two days as we drove in to work. Number four son was half asleep in the back, but interjecting his own comments on occasion.
Staff seem to be catching on that we arrive early because a lot of them were there within minutes of our arrival. Bummer. I need that first half hour just to get to the point where I can deal with the day. The rush at the door meant we were running flat out within minutes of arrival. A training session for deputy returning officers and poll clerks began at 9:30 am so a number of people had arrived early to vote.
First crisis rears its head. One of the in-office registration officers received a call just mid morning from someone claiming to be from Elections Canada in Ottawa. They said that they had removed an elector of ours from the list in error and demanded the agent re-enter the person's name. So the young lady asked how it was that they had the power to delete yet not add. Good call. The young woman called the person named and she claimed that Elections Canada had called her to advise her that she had been removed and that she would be reinstated. Not in this life time. No identification and oath, no registration. Period. Gathered more information to report back to Ottawa. My Automation Co-ordinator overheard the discussion and noted that a friend of hers working in registration in the Electoral District next to ours, had received a similar call this week. Called Ottawa. They were not amused. I suggested that they might want to circulate an alert - at least in this province - to all the Returning Offices. Enough padding of the electoral lists when voter turnout is likely to be low because of summer holidays and the whole election could be won based on registered names of people who do not exist. Read the biography of Huey Long to see how that works
I continued work on the notice for mobile polls while I was talking with my office co-ordinator. Continuing our discussion and expanding on the teams we need for the next two weeks to move training and preparation for voting day to its conclusion. I was also trying to get through all the approvals pending in the database, so that names can finally reside on the voters list. I asked my co-ordinator to get a read from each of our current office staff for polling day with respect to their commitments, so I can make the best use of the skills and abilities they can offer that day. We compiled the list of names and she wrote up a memo explaining the rationale. Explaining the planning rationale usually works best as staff are more committed to their chosen tasks.
The co-ordinator returned about an hour later - just as I was finishing up the mobile poll notice, translating it into French - to say that the in-office supervisor for registration had ordered her not to talk to the people who were working on that team. This is the person we have identified as probably instigating and manipulating the blow up with the voter information cards a week ago. When my co-ordinator asked why she was being told to have no contact with that group, the supervisor said she had already put all of them into registration desks in the polls for Election Day.
Now first of all, the only recruiting that was supposed to be underway at this time is for DROs and Poll Clerks. That is because the polls cannot open unless there is one team - A DRO and a Poll Clerk - for each poll division. In our case that is about 200 polls or 400 people. The only people authorized to place applicants are those on the recruiting team and they report only to me. All the other staff are important but not essential in the same way. My instructions were that all those positions had to be filled first. Last count there were still 70 positions to fill for just that part of the recruiting. Secondly I had already made it clear in our morning meetings that on the advice of the supervisors of that team, the people already out going door to door and filling out forms were going to be offered the registration jobs first. They are already trained by virtue of their work for us and we also have been able to assess the finished work handed in. We know those people can handle the forms, the paper shuffle and the public relations demands of the job. Poor placement of individuals in those positions guarantees long line up in polls with high growth communities - almost half of this constituency.
Called my assistant away from working with the door to door registration agents to decide how to approach the issue. It seems clear that the in-office supervisor is trying to provoke a confrontation working through other people. To me that is a lot like dealing with a two year old who refuses to eat or go to bed when they are supposed to in order to gain a position of "power". Neither the bed nor the food is the issue. Rule number one for parents - never engage in a power struggle with a small child. You are responsible for their well being. You don't have to have approval or permission to attend to that from the child. That is what power struggles boil down to. I don't need approval or permission to make the decisions I have to for election day either, although I will try to make the opportunity to let people play to their strengths as much as possible - means more success for them, and hence, for my responsibilities. Since I have the broader perspective on all the staff in my office that placement is my decision alone.
I decided that I would just explain - again - that the door to door agents were already tried, tested, and most capable of dealing with the pressure long line ups would cause. There are 40 positions maximum and I have 60 agents to draw from. The volume of calls from people to our office asking where to vote is massive on polling day. The in-office agents have been working on that from day one. They know the software and the protocols better than any one. That is where I need their skills focussed - good, accurate client service.
I called the recruitment agent who was on site today in and checked to see how much damage had been done by the supervisors' interference. About 10 people had been misassigned. I asked the recruiter to call those people to offer them DRO postions. About the same rate of pay - different tasks that's all. I had to reassure her that she wasn't in trouble and that, in fact, her work would help me out of the jam the supervisor had secretly tried to create. The supervisor had taken advantage of the recruitment team by changing the instructions given to a clerk who was asked to do the phoning while the recruiters were busy setting up training classes. I had to emphasize again that no one reports to anyone but me. They don't have to answer to any one else no matter how "humble" their position is perceived to be.
Bullying of one of the young male staff was the next problem. Same instigator. This time the office co-ordinator was the vehicle to go after the young man. Complaints to her about his quality of work were issued. I did a quiet check in the databse to verify the claim of inaccuracy and sloppy work. Not justified by the stats. In fact the young guy was one of those making the least mistakes. What is the motive for this one. He left at the end of his shift looking very discouraged. I waited for a bit then called him at home. I just wanted to let him know I was aware of the behaviour and that it wasn't his fault. I'll deal with that tomorrow.
A call from the local rep for Elections Canada. Possibility of two more computers. Could I send someone from my office to Medicine Hat tonight. Umm well their office was to close in less than an hour right? It's a three hour drive - lead foot - from here. How does Greyhound sound? Next question was that if all the ports in our hub are filled with the computers already on their way from Ottawa, what would their purpose be -can they be set up as free standing entities. Appears so. That might mean one for the recruiting team and one for finance. We'll see. A bit of a verbal rebuke for not letting her in on another problem with the voters list. I had written to the two heads of Elections Canada because the implications of what my door to door and in-office registration staff and voter cards were of great concern. They were also somewhat speculative at that point because I didn't have all the stats. I was hoping I was dead wrong but I didn't want silence on my part to allow the damage that would occur on polling day. To me that meant containing the information to more senior levels. Because they have a broader view of what is going on across the country there may be some other explanation that I don't have enough information to discern. No use calling the sky is falling when it might just be rain, eh?
Next crisis was the voters' list itself. Cut off for data entry for adding names to the revised list was this evening. The supervisor causing the problems also had the responsibility of training them. There was a lot of misinformation given to the data entry people that wasn't caught until the Automation Co-ordinator and her assistant started running the reports we have to have every night. The results of that disinformation became obvious late last week and the assistant retrained everyone this week when we finally had some extra time freed up from all the other tasks we have to do. The problem was that the initial damage still needed to be addressed. I started working on that from my end around 1 PM. We left tonight at 9:30 pm when the servers were locked down. I had been trying to save the information about the quality of the data entry staffs work onto a diskette, in case I had to proceed further with the bullying problem. I think that is what triggered the early shut down. About 100 names out of 75,000 were locked out but I have a way fo ensuring that they will be available to the DROs who will work in the advance polls this next weekend. In the interim we can work the missing names into the next - the final - list of electors between now and Election Day.
Again the discussion turned to whether to fire the person causing all the problems. There is no barrier to that except that she has insinuated just enough of her own people into the office that chaos would likely ensue and the potential for sabotage would go up - not down. Her postion ends one week from now so we want to just contain the issue for that time then there is less potential for her to really cause harm -wishful thinking maybe. But each time she makes these attempts the more people have seen what she is really doing. Any more and she won't have too much support left I think. We'll see.
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