The field interface §1
The same product should look radically different depending on the role
Roughly 237 Vote Centers for the primary and 250–260 for the general election, in one county alone, means the interface has to work as a fleet-management surface rather than as a collection of isolated tablets. It also means the tablet in a poll worker’s hands at 6:00 a.m. cannot be the same screen as the county’s operating picture. Same platform, same record, three different cognitive environments.
Role one
Poll worker
BB2G ELECTION COMMAND — Maricopa County — Vote Center / Location — 2026 General Election
Status
Site Operational Equipment Check Complete Custody Items Current 2 Tasks Need Attention ONLINE
Six tiles and a status block. Everything a person opening a polling place has to do, and nothing else. The status block is first because the first question anyone asks a tablet at 6:00 a.m. is whether the site is actually all right.
Role two
Polling-place manager — the same six, plus seven
A manager is responsible for people, supplies, exceptions and the decision to escalate. None of those belong on a worker’s screen, and all of them belong here.
Role three
County command — the operating picture
MARICOPA COUNTY ELECTION OPERATING PICTURE
Note the last two rows. Unsynchronized tablets is an operational fact that only exists because the field application is honest about its own sync state, and source / procedure alerts only exists because source currency is tracked per section rather than per page.
The part that is a design decision, not a permissions detail
Six things that must not be exposed to ordinary field users
Audit Workspace
Scope, sampling, workpapers, findings and management responses.
Cyber Risk Register
Risks, likelihood and impact rationale, owners and residual risk.
Retention Rules
Record classes, retention schedules, holds and disposition approval.
Entity Graph
The operational relationship map of facilities, assets, vendors and documents.
Legal Source Administration
The source registry, section verification and supersession.
Statewide Analytics
Cross-jurisdiction operational comparison.
“Those functions still exist. They simply do not belong in that user’s cognitive environment.” This is not a claim that a poll worker could not understand a risk register. It is a claim that a person running a polling place has a specific job for the next fourteen hours, and every additional surface on that tablet is competing with it.
The big red button
Are you or someone else in immediate danger?
HELP should stay. It should also ask a question first.
The large HELP control belongs on the screen. What it must not be is a single action that treats every press as the same emergency. So the first thing it does is ask:
Are you or someone else in immediate danger?
If yes
Display the jurisdiction-approved emergency procedure and the emergency-services option. The procedure shown is the approved one for that jurisdiction and that election — retrieved, not improvised, and not written by this platform.
If no
- Threat / disturbance
- Medical issue
- Equipment/safety hazard
- Need supervisor
- Need security assistance
- Other urgent issue
The blueprint’s reason, exactly: “That is safer than making every button press a police call.” A worker who needs a supervisor, a replacement printer or a bottle of water for someone unwell will press a button that summons armed response exactly once before deciding never to press it again — including on the night they should.
Observed behavior, interpretation, suspected motive
Incident capture keeps these three permanently separate. It is operationally sound and it is clinically sound, and it is the field-level expression of the same discipline that the evidence ladder enforces in the schema.
Observed behavior
What the person recording it actually saw or heard. Required. Recorded in their words, with the time and the location.
Interpretation
What the observer took it to mean. Separate field, separately attributed, and it is allowed to be wrong — which is why it is not stored as though it were the observation.
Suspected motive
Optional, and clearly marked as a suspicion held by a named person. The platform never generates this field and never infers it from the other two.
Why the separation is worth the extra field. A person can be agitated, make a threat or violate a rule without software attempting to diagnose why. Collapse the three into one free-text box and a reviewer three weeks later cannot tell which part of the report was seen and which part was assumed — and by then the person who wrote it may not be able to tell either.
What the field surface is standing on
All three role surfaces run against the same shared services. The tiles differ; the record does not. A custody event created on a worker’s tablet, a manager’s escalation and a dispatch issued from county command are the same kind of canonical event, in the same chain, with the same receipt. That is what makes a fleet of several hundred tablets a single operating picture rather than several hundred separate stories.
Operational references on this page are drawn from Maricopa County’s published 2026 Primary and General Elections Plan. Nothing on this page is an approved procedure for any jurisdiction, and nothing here replaces one.