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Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Several years ago GetCalhoun.com started making local election results available by what's known as an "inline frame" wherein we here are able to incorporate the local election database provided by the Calhoun County Sheriff Department's website.

What I saw from my end last night was typical of what I have seen before, with a kicker. The page offered was a representation of the results from the last race until 8:58pm when it was finally updated with the stats from the Nov 2 race.

The kicker was that the Sheriff Department's website got bogged down, presumably from all the people trying to login to it and stayed locked up for a good part of the evening up until the results were finally updated.

In the meantime, I suppose, because GetCalhoun.com was logged in to their system from the getgo, viewers could see their website from the GetCalhoun.com window. However, all they saw was election results from months ago.

What I'm saying here is that while I don't have a clue as to the problems of whoever was in charge of updating the voting database, it's clear that something needs to be done because their performance was very bad. Obviously some results were available early in the evening. Their database SHOULD have been updated publicly throughout the evening instead of only at 9PM. And if this wasn't possible, at least they should have put something online to let us know they were working on the problem instead of leaving the results from July on all night.

At the least, there is an air of incompetence and a lack of understanding of the needs of the public.

I say again, I don't know who was typing in the results or what their problems were, but they could have gone a long way in mitigating the unprofessional appearance of their presentation by simply putting up a page saying that the results would be presented soon. Something like that.

I know there was confusion last night, and a meltdown of their server by people looking for answers that weren't forthcoming. It would have been so simple to avoid this. It's called "web presence." They need more of that.

If someone from the Election Board or Sheriff's office has a comment on my comment, we'd love to hear it. Guaranteed to be posted here.