# Polling-booth pencils are now retired at 34 millimetres

> A School of Continuous Improvement paper surveys pencil stub and tether lengths in 1,122 voting booths, and a shire's returning officer has written the result into its polling-day rules.

The School of Continuous Improvement has measured the pencil on the string in every voting booth of sixty-one polling places, and a shire's returning officer has written the result into the rules for the next election. The paper, published today, reports how long the pencils were, how long the strings were, and what the returning officer now requires of both.

Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, led the work with Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, and Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard.

> We came away with a better sense of how much of a polling place the School had never looked at directly.
>
> --- Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard

Enumerators working in pairs visited each booth at opening and at close with calipers and a spring balance. Reporting the results as full distributions rather than averages brought the stationery into view as a population, with two groups of pencils and a long run of generous strings.

The returning officer has adopted the survey's eighteenth percentile, 34 millimetres, as the length below which a pencil is retired, set a band of 380 to 440 millimetres for tethers, and introduced an hourly Booth Stationery Register on which each polling place's conformity is published. The standard carries no presiding-officer waiver and will be recomputed after each general election. A follow-up survey of 204 booths at the next election found pencils and tethers sitting close to the edges of the bands.

The release marks a satisfying step in the School's long attention to what sits just beside the ballot paper. "A threshold is at its best in the first season it is read aloud," said Dr Okafor.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dpeb8d.