Paper petitions went by the wayside at the Madison County Fair in Highland, IL, July 25-30, 2023.
The Convention of States booth was staffed by three volunteers using specially programmed iPads. Fairgoers of all ages gladly used the iPads as a quick and easy way to fill out and sign the COS petition.
Marty Benner, lead SIA in Illinois since 2016, came up with the idea after entering mountains of paper petitions. She was frustrated by illegible handwriting and the length of time it took to manually enter and process the information from the paper petitions into the national database.
When programmer Chris Lewis joined the Illinois SIA team in March 2023, Benner approached him with the iPad idea. A few short weeks later, Lewis had a workable prototype. An iPad was connected to a small network supplied by a tiny device called a Raspberry Pi.
Using donated iPads and a Raspberry Pi purchased from eBay, the design was improved and tested many times. The keypad solved the problem of unreadable handwriting. Use of the Raspberry Pi eliminated spotty or non-existent internet service, and the petition information was transferred electronically into the national database. The information was checked for validity and often available for the COS follow-up team volunteers the next day.
The expenses are minimal: donated iPad, or Raspberry Pi, about $20 on eBay. The turnaround time from the electronic petition being filled out to the card in each iPad being downloaded every night to becoming available to volunteers is incredibly fast.
Lewis continues to tweak the program. Each time the iPads were deployed, the Illinois team learned something new, for example, the heat of Illinois summers could slow down the iPads. This was solved by having extra ones to rotate into service, while the hot ones were allowed to cool by a fan and get charged.
The full scope of how helpful the iPads are was proved at the Illinois State Fair, Aug. 10 - 20, in Springfield, IL. One thousand, nine hundred nine petitions were processed through the iPads. Multiple days to enter paper petitions were no more. Now, the people who are scrambling are the Follow-Up Team (FUT) members who had the number in the FUT tool shoot up from under 100 to almost 1,900 in less than a week.
The Illinois team is glad to share information about this process. Contact martha.benner@cosaction.com, chris.lewis@cosaction.com, or join the raspberry-pi-petitions channel in the SIA workspace on Slack.
