County Updates

The lottery for candidate order on the upcoming primary election ballots was held yesterday and the County's seriously aging IT infrastructure was highlighted. First, the News-Gazette had coverage of the ballot order lottery:

In each of those four races — for Champaign County circuit clerk and three county board seats — there were two Democratic candidates who came to the clerk’s office on the same day, at the same time, during the filing period to run in the primaries next year.

As a result of the lottery, names on the Democratic primary ballot for the following four offices will be listed in this order:

— Circuit Clerk: Robert Burkhalter, followed by Susan McGrath.

— County board District 6: DeShawn Williams, then Charles Young.

— County board District 8: Giraldo Rosales, then Emily Rodriguez.

— County board District 10: Connie Dillard-Myers, then Mary King.

Full article here. WCIA also had a short blurb here. For more information, including studies on ballot order effect, Mother Jones had an excellent article here that explains how the effect varies for low information versus high information (e.g. presidential) elections. From their cited study:

Across all twenty-four contests, the effect is invariably positive and, with two exceptions in runoff elections, statistically significant. The smallest effects are found in high-profile, high information races: the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, which featured the incumbent, John Cornyn; the governor’s race, which featured long-time Attorney General Greg Abbott; and Land Commissioner, which featured well-known political newcomer George P. Bush. In these races the ballot order effect is only one or two percentage points.

Larger estimates obtain for most “medium-profile, medium-information” races such as Comptroller, Railroad Commissioner, or the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator. Most of these fall in a fairly tight band that ranges from three to five percentage points. Estimates are even larger in the low-profile, low-information judicial elections, generally ranging from seven to ten percentage points. Overall, the ballot order effect tends to be larger in contests that receive less attention and in which voters are likely to know less about the candidates on the ballot.

For a close local primary race without major controversies or attention, ballot order can make a serious difference. That full article here.

WILL had coverage on some of the serious problems with aging information technology at the county. Excerpts from what is, frankly, a logistically dire technology situation:

For city and county governments, maintaining infrastructure applies to buildings, roads and vehicles. But in recent years, that list has increasingly included information technology. In Champaign County, local officials are trying to come to grips with what they need to keep their IT up to date.

Champaign County’s director of IT, Andy Rhodes, got started with the county’s computer systems in the 1980’s. Back then, IBM’s AS/400 platform (later rebranded as the IBM System i) was new, and some of the software running on it was custom-made for the task at hand. Today, Champaign County still relies on a version of the AS/400 and those custom-made programs, and the one county employee who knows the programming language they’re written in. He's the county's senior business applications developer, Bill Simmering. Rhodes introduced him at the first meeting of a special county board IT planning committee...

There is money identified for some of the projects in Champaign County’s new IT plan. Those are the ones in the new county budget that starts in January 2020. They include financial software, the county’s oldest, dating back to the 1970’s. That’s one of the software packages running on the AS/400, which is itself slated for replacement in a couple of years by a new version of the same platform. Andy Rhodes, the IT director, says there aren’t many software packages suited to their needs being made for the AS/400 these days, but Champaign County still needs it to run the old software. And as long as the county needs the AS/400, they’ll need Bill Simmering, who’s expected to be available in retirement, to help out  on a part-time basis.

Full article here.