About a year ago, I volunteered to sit on a Voter Outreach Workgroup put together by the Madison City Clerk's Office. At the first meeting, I agreed to review the elections website and make suggestions for clarifying election information, and after doing so I put together a lengthy list of comments about what I'd found. I happened to pull up that document this afternoon, and was interested to see the following as very first thing mentioned:
- No obvious way to get to election info from cityofmadison.com home page
- Link to Clerk’s Office via Agencies menu at top of screen only useful if you know Clerk’s office oversees elections
- Voter ID Information link in Most Requested services box, but you have to scroll down to see it
Here's what's interesting about that: I was looking for the dates of the 2014 spring elections just the other day, and happened to notice that eleven months after submitting the results of my review, there is still no obvious way to get to election info from the City of Madison home page. I knew how to find it, so in my case no harm done, but anyone else looking for that information might well be out of luck. Having worked for several of them, I know government entities rarely move very quickly, but eleven months with no progress is bad even by government standards.
