Santa Fe County Clerk’s Office Does Focus Group with Presiding Judges

Denise Lamb, the Deputy County Clerk in Santa Fe County, contacted me to share the results of a couple of focus groups her staff ran after the recent election with poll judges. In late April, her election coordinator, Pat Hummer, hosted two focus groups for presiding judges to, “find out their thoughts about how we could improve elections.” The focus groups were very productive and Pat built the attached spreadsheet summarizing her findings and the actions they will take in response.

This is an awesome idea and one in which Mike, Thad and I advocate in a book we are writing on evaluating elections. I have posted Denise and Pat’s outcome report here Summary of Results of the PJ Focus Group because I think this provides a great example of how feedback can lead to productive and positive changes in election administration practices and how LEOs can seek out useful information fairly cheaply.

A number of the policy changes in the summary are consistent with recommendations we have made based upon our election observations and our surveys of poll workers, which shows how different types of data collection methods can produce complimentary results and reinforce findings. In addition, many new items appeared that could inform future data collection efforts and tweaks in current election administration practices.