The Orange County Registrar of Voter‘s office used to be a statewide embarrassment. Every Election Night, eager politicos waited for the excruciatingly slow county election bureaucracy to tabulate the results. It wasn‘t unusual to wait until lat at night just to get the first round of absentee voters. It was like the tabulating was being done in "bullet time" — which is cool in The Matrix but not cool when waiting on the outcome of elections.

All that began changing rapidly with the accession of Neal Kelley as first Acting OC Registrar, and now as the permanent OC Registrar of Voters. Kelley is busily bringing his office into the 21st Century.

You can watch ballot boxes bring brought into the OC Registrar‘s on the Election Night Webcam, get precinct turnout reports, etc. My personal favorite is the countdown clock on the elections results page that tells you when the next results will be posted — and absentee votes are posted almost immediately after the polls close.

The latest feature unveiled is the Election Results Mapping System. As Kelley explains:

In the tradition of continual improvement and innovation we have developed, in conjunction with our map software vendor, Election Results Mapping.  This new feature will allow users to click on a map of Orange County (down to specific precincts and even poll sites) and observe results for contests specific to the precincts they select.  You can even print these maps from our website.  Orange County is the first in the country to launch this service. 

Since I first got involved in OC politics 15 years ago, there have been four Registrars. Virtually nothing changed until Kelley arrived on the scene. Personally, I don‘t think this burst of innovation and increased customer-service orientation is unrelated to the fact Mr. Kelley was a businessman. This is from a recent Riverside Press-Enterprise article:

"It‘s been quite a ride," Kelley said of a tenure that has included putting on five elections since last October amid a statewide debate over electronic-voting machines.

Kelley owned the Phototorium camera store from 1989 to 2000. He was a San Bernardino police officer before that. He ran unsuccessfully for the Riverside Community College District in 1999.

Kelley commutes to Santa Ana from his home in Riverside‘s Woodcrest neighborhood. He has no regrets about leaving the camera shop for the high-stakes arena of running elections in a county of almost 1.5 million voters, he said.

"Being in business for yourself is satisfying. But there‘s a lot of responsibility that goes with this job," he said.

Neal Kelley knows from experience you have to innovate and be customer-service oriented in order to attract customers — and that is showing through in the rapid pace of innovation at the OC Registrars Office.

So tomorrow night, while politicos in other counties wait for ponderously slow Registrars to post results, Orange Countians will have long known the outcomes of all but the very closest contests — leaving us much more time for post-election analysis at the bar.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.