Elections strain Clerk’s office resources

During a discussion on campaign finance reform (elaborated upon here), Austin City Clerk Jeanette Goodall revealed that this past 78-candidate election took its toll on people outside of the media, too. When Goodall was asked about a plan to institute online filing for candidates and questioned about why it hadn’t yet been implemented, she gave a brief history and made it clear that her office would embrace the plan being taken up again. Essentially, the city started the project, but it was abandoned when it became apparent that creating the system would be expensive. Goodall pointed out that it isn’t just building an online system; it is also maintaining the system and keeping it up-to-date. “Trust me when I say … I would love to have an electronic filing system,” said Goodall. “Because when you have 78 candidates coming into our office, that pretty much knocks out my entire department for the entire day … Some of the candidates, their reports are four- or five-hundred pages long. They have to print them out, bring them into our office, and we re-scan them and post them out on the Web. It’s not the most efficient.”