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OpenMaine / ballot-tracking

Investigating how Maine's absentee ballot tracking system currently works, and could be expanded.
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Try out the state's tracking system #2

Open JohnBrooking opened 4 years ago

JohnBrooking commented 4 years ago

From the Absentee Ballot Request page, click "Check the status of your absentee ballot" to get to the tracking form. Try it out, and document notable findings below.

JohnBrooking commented 4 years ago

(1) Inflexible date entry

Date of Birth is a free-form text field, with the prompt "(Example: mm/dd/yyyy)".

If you leave off a leading zero in either the month or day, it misinterprets the date and makes you do it right. Example: "7/4/1976" leads to "You must enter a valid Date of Birth.", and the value in the input field now shows as "74/19/76". Entering "7/14/1976" is similarly interpreted as "71/41/976".

Lame. Would be very simple to check for a leading zero and add one if it isn't there, in either position.

JohnBrooking commented 4 years ago

(2) Broken link for feedback

After successfully getting to the status, the "Provide feedback" link in the "Where to go from here?" section doesn't work.

Link goes to https://www.maine.gov/portal/app_support/app_feedback.html

That page gives error "The page isn’t redirecting properly".

Since the feedback mechanism is what was broken, I went to the more general contact form for the Secretary of State's office and used it to report both of these first 2 issues.

JohnBrooking commented 4 years ago

(3) Update help information with status link

From the Help Portal at https://www1.maine.gov/portal/help/index.html, under the "Absentee Ballot Request and Voter Information Lookup" topic, the second question asks "how can I check the status of it", needs to be updated with the new lookup service. It still says that Uniformed Service or Overseas Voters can check their status here, but all others need to contact their municipal clerk.

JohnBrooking commented 4 years ago

In response to my feedback on issues (1) and (2), I got this reply from the Kristen Schulze Muszynski, Director of Communications for the SoS's office:

Thank you for connecting with us. We have asked our online service provider to fix the dead link for the feedback and the other one too. The DOB field is the way the service is setup; it does show an example above the field that shows how to enter it; it's the way they set up their services. Hope you find the service useful just the same, and thank you for the feedback.

I still think the DOB handling is lame, but apparently that's on their contractor. (Also interesting that it is apparently written in Perl, indicated by the ".pl" extension. I have seen this elsewhere on the state's page.)