I had no idea how much was involved
in running a polling place when I volunteered to do it. I have been unemployed for a long time and I
was looking for any sort of work to do, whether it pays a token amount or
nothing. The job of Poll Inspector paid a token amount that was close to
nothing. When I saw my title, I thought I would be observing, just making sure
everything went by the book. I didn’t realize yet that the Inspector not only
has to know-it-all but be able to DO everything in the book, or that it was a
jam-packed book!
My list of duties came in the actual
paper-mail. After reading it, I started worrying. I am not the most organized
person, even among hippie-artist types and absent-minded professors. In fact, I
left my interior lights on in the car the night before election day and was
saved by an alert neighbor. To strengthen my self-confidence, I thought about
all the plays I had directed in my youth: all the last minute details and sudden
unwarranted trust placed in those delegated to help. This couldn’t be harder
than that. But it was. It was like doing an all-day play in a new space with no
rehearsal and a cast you just met.
You have an hour to set up before
opening the polls at 7 am. I wanted to
set up booths and a kiosk the day before, but there was an event in the space that
night, so I couldn’t even move tables around. I had been keeping the entire
polling place “set” in our guest room, and I loaded it back into the car at about
5 am on Tuesday morning. My wife helped me with the heavy Precinct Ballot
Recorder. I had yet to meet and had
barely spoken to my crew on the phone.
No one was there when I arrived.
They all drove into the small parking lot about 5 to six, including the man who
was letting us into the facility. My Clerk crew consisted of: two precocious
and hard-working 17-year old students, male and female; an alert and capable
woman who looked too young to be a grandmother and spoke some Spanish; a round,
calm bilingual woman with thick, shiny black hair and amazing multi-tasking abilities,
and an older Asian woman who laughed at herself when she forgot something, but was
ultimately reliable and unflappable. I
was very lucky that two of them had previously been Poll Clerks. They wondered
why they gave me the job of Inspector since I had never been a clerk first, but
they were nothing but helpful except for some good-natured teasing. They
corrected me gently and let me delegate without question. They were a great
crew.
The only real emergency was the
malfunction of the Precinct Ballot Recorder’s printer. We already had to keep
tallies and checklists on every single thing we did, so another would break our
backs. I called a couple of emergency numbers on my election-dedicated cell phone
before anyone answered. I could hear shouting in the background.
“How can I…. No! Just hold on…. Sorry,
how can help you?”
“Our PBR printer has stopped
printing and we get an error message on the screen…”
“Try tightening up the paper roll.”
“I tried that and it didn’t work. “
“Well, let me hand you off to
someone who had more experience” he said, and I could relate.
The next voice on the phone said
“Pull the printer out of the PBR, it’s only held in with Velcro.”
I reached down and felt for the
bottom of the rectangular metal printer. I pulled hard on what felt like the
edge of Velcro and the whole thing came out, heavy enough not to fly out of my
hands from momentum and still attached by a cord to the rest of the Ballot
Recorder. Everyone in the room looked over at me, especially my crew. I said
quickly, “Don’t worry. It was just loud Velcro!”
Back on the phone I said, “Ok, it’s
out. Now what? “
“The switch is on the bottom. Turn
it on and off again.”
“Ok.” I said, shrugging and
flipping the switch. Suddenly the printer made a noise, the error message on
the screen disappeared and voting was not interrupted. Even when we had a
couple of different “problem voters," the voting never stopped.
The first person
who caused a problem approached the Roster Clerk waving a Vote-by-Mail envelope
and reeling off a speech she had on “repeat” about how she didn’t ask for a
Vote by Mail ballot. Her problem as she
saw it was that she had changed to Republican to vote in the Primary and that
she had a REASON for doing so. Because
she wouldn’t stop talking, it was hard to explain anything to her. We suggested
she vote provisionally, which was done by about 10% of the voters by the end of
the day. Provisional voting means that even if you walked in off the street at
the wrong polling place, you can still vote.
For her, it was a matter of some unknown principal that she not be
forced to Vote Provisionally.
“It counts the
same as any other vote, and you get to vote for who you want either way,” I
tried to explain.
“No. I could
understand if I had asked for a Vote by Mail envelope, but I didn’t.” she said,
for maybe the fifth time since coming in the door. Then she went off her script
and grumbled, “It’s a conspiracy against Republicans. It’s because they want to
see “Ds” only. They sent me this ballot so I couldn’t vote Republican. But I
changed for a reason.”
Trying to keep
from either getting angry or laughing I said, “No, I don’t think that’s the
problem. “
Finally, one of
the more experienced poll workers on my crew came to my rescue. “Just let her
vote with a crossover ballot and surrender the vote by mail ballot.” she said
softly, from behind the irate woman. I held my hand
out to receive her unused, and decidedly unwanted mail ballot, but she held
onto it and stepped back. I threw my hands up and she tossed it on my table and
went off smiling smugly. “Surrender” was the official term, but perhaps not the
right choice of word when speaking to someone so certain their rights were being
infringed upon by rabid liberals. When she left the ballot booth she kept up
the smile, directed at me for some reason.
I guess she assumed I was a liberal despite my short hair, long pants,
hard shoes and Captain America’s shield on my shirt.
The second problem
voter came in with a slower, more swaggering kind of defiance. She was wearing
a high school athletic team workout-ensemble, sneakers and a baseball hat. She
approached the Roster clerk and said her name and party before Sophia could ask
her.
“Sign here.” said
Sophia, the high school senior.
“Why do I have to
sign?” asked the voter, squinting at the poor kid.
Sophia looked back
at me with a worried expression. While
smart and very competent she was only 17. I chimed in, “Uh....so we can mark you off as
having voted.”
The woman in the
gym-suit relaxed. “Ok, just asking. Got a right to ask, you know.”
I am not making
up any of this. I need to tell you that because you may not believe what
happened next. The smiling Republican woman swaggered to the Precinct Ballot
Reader and inserted it into the machine. The machine immediately spat it back
out.
“What the hell?”
she exclaimed, her jaw dropping and her eyes getting wide.
Roberto, the
other 17-year-old poll worker said, “The machine printed an error message that
you over-voted.”
“What the hell
does that mean?” she asked.
“You voted twice
in the same contest. The state senate candidates were on two separate pages,
that’s usually where people over-vote.”
“But not for President.”
She said grabbing the ballot back. “As long as my vote for President gets
counted…I still don’t think I messed up. Show me, where is the extra vote?”
We were trained
by the County Registrar’s office to answer any and all questions. Roberto
opened and reached into the compartment on the Precinct Ballot Recorder and
took out a previously over-voted ballot he had just put in there 15 minutes
before. After voting, the ballots show
just a series of dots where the candidate’s vote holes were in the plastic
guide pages. Without a key there is no way to tell which dot means what. Except
that Roberto had circled where the over-voting on the Senate race occurred.
“Here is another
one that over-voted on the senate contest, see, it’s the same dots as yours.”
As Roberto placed
the voided ballot into the box on the machine and closed the lid, the woman
squinted at it with suspicion. I suppose she thought it might be a secret
compartment into which Republican votes disappeared forever. She thought better
of saying anything aloud, but I saw her look and frown and tilt her head when
the box disappeared into the machine.
“You can
override that vote and the rest will still count or you can vote again.” said Roberto,
who waited for an answer.
“That’s ok, then,
override it. I came to vote for President.” Said the woman who wanted it known
that she voted for Trump without saying it, just like the woman with the
unwanted Vote by Mail Ballot.
About a dozen
registered Republicans cross-voted Democrat, each one ostensibly a vote for
Bernie or Hilary. But there were also some who went the other way, usually from
Libertarian to Republican. One of the men who did this said “My candidate has
already won the nomination.” Another man
switching to Republican just came right out and said, “I came to vote for
Trump.” I swallowed my concern and said, “You will need a Republican ballot.” Neither
of these men looked like they would benefit from a Trump Presidency.
I think the poll
workers probably WERE all Democrats, even the kids, who had a year to wait
before they could vote. I am sure that as usual I was the farthest left of
anyone in the room. Not one of us ever said anything about any candidate or
issue during the entire 14-hour stretch, and neither did almost all of the voters.
I suppose I could have invalidated the vote of the guy who said “I came to vote
for Trump,” because he had arguably committed electioneering within 100 feet of
the polls, but he was intimidating so I let it go.
At 5 till 8, I stepped a few paces
out the door and yelled, “The polls are closed!” Even before I had actually
closed the doors, the Clerks all hurriedly began closing procedures according
to the guidelines and checklists and tallies and report sheets. It was around
this time that the sole of my left shoe came loose and began to flap. I wore
one shoe until someone noticed, which took longer than you would think. I put it
back on and made a flapping sound with every other footstep for the rest of the
night. I felt like a lame clown as I assigned the crew to the final checks on
everything. The two teenagers were panicking a little for the first time. They
thought their numbers didn’t match between the Roster and the Voter Tally and
the Ballot Count. Just as I began to be concerned, they figured it out and we
were done. The closing and packing up took a little less than an hour.
We loaded up my
car with every last remnant of the polls, including the sealed White Box
containing voided ballots and all election trash, including tiny bits of paper
with nothing on them. After thanks and goodbyes, all but one of the crew got in
their cars and drove away. It felt strange to say goodbye to them so quickly, thinking
of what we had accomplished together and that we might not ever see each other
again. At least that’s how it felt to me. Marisol, the
multi-tasker stayed behind and rode with me to deliver the votes. As we pulled
up in front of the City Center complex, a sort of “pit crew” suddenly appeared.
The group of six or seven people began unloading as soon as I released the lock
on the hatchback. After signing something no one had time to read, I took
Marisol back to her car and we wished each other well.
Driving toward home I
could hardly believe that the job was over and had been completely successful. I thought about how
six strangers had made it possible for about five hundred people to participate
in what passes now for democracy. Even an irresponsible vote for an
irresponsible candidate is cast by an active citizen, taking some small amount
of responsibility for the future.
