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Top Comments: My Midterms Pollworking Experience Edition [1]

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Date: 2022-11-14

I actually made sure to give myself time to appreciate the lunar eclipse, since it so conveniently happened to peak at 5:59am!

I know the midterm elections feel like foreeeever ago… oh, wait, we don’t know the results in all of them yet, and I’m writing this while watching Chris Hayes and Steve Kornacki discuss Arizona, so... nevermind /EmilyLitella.

My little Massachusetts city of ~30K residents has a total of fourteen voting precincts, and ever since the pandemic we’ve all voted in the high school gymnasium instead of scattered throughout the city. In both September’s primary and last Tuesday’s general election I was a precinct warden, responsible for overseeing everything that happened in my corner of the gym — not my own voting precinct, though, which was true for everyone as far as I could tell. It was an exhausting day filled with ups and downs, and I’ll happily do it whenever called upon because I really enjoy it. Let me tell you a bit about how it all went…

It goes without saying that being a poll worker involves caffeine. I was awake at 4:45am so I could shower, get breakfast and coffee, head over to where we were allowed to park and get to my precinct by 6am with enough time to stare at the lunar eclipse for a few minutes. As it turned out, the next time I stepped outside was 9:45pm.

My precinct clerk was a veteran of many elections and had been a warden a number of times, so it made setting up our tabulator easy. I’d gone to a hands-on training to make sure I remembered how to do it but with my clerk right there both to advise and also keep our official election record, we quickly were set up, zero tapes on the wall, and had our tabulator ready to go by 6:30! Our inspectors showed up a bit late but we got our ballots counted into packs of 50, our two voter check-in rolls ready and at 7am precisely, the sound of fourteen gavels opening the polls was heard!

I wasn’t sure if we were going to be busy or bored, because so many people in my city took advantage of either early voting at City Hall, or mail-in voting. We had a line of voters ten minutes after we opened and it stayed steady with occasional busy moments until about a half hour before polls closed at 8pm. I took a brief moment to hug K1 when they came to vote (at 7:15am, and if you’ve ever known a person who was… umm… difficult to get going in the morning as a teen you’ll know how proud I was when they said “I wanted to vote before work”!!)

One thing that surprised me was the number of voters on our Inactive Voter List. City Hall sends out a household census each January, coupled with the dog license renewal form, and in the least-known fact ever it’s that census that keeps you on the Active Voter Roll, NOT voting in the past election! We were expecting some, but we did NOT expect over 80 just in our precinct! In order to vote, Inactive voters need to show documentation that they live at the address on the roll, and as you’d expect there’s Paperwork to fill out. This generally is work the clerk does, and that poor woman sometimes had two or three people filling out affadavits at once while she wrote down necessary information. But with only one exception (person didn’t have any identification with them and declined to go get and come back), everyone cast a ballot!

Unlike some states where early/mail-in ballots cannot be processed before the polls open, election officials are permitted to check in these ballots (still in their envelopes) in advance, so when we get our voter rolls they already have every voter whose ballot had arrived by Monday marked as ‘voted’. About two hours after the polls opened, our election officials began bringing packets of these ballot envelopes over and after the inspectors confirmed they were crossed off in the books, the clerk and I ran them through the tabulator whenever no in-person voter was waiting. At least one-third of the ~1100 ballots cast in my precinct were early votes so we were BUSY!

I was pleased to have very few people make conspiracy theory comments after hearing several during the primary, and everyone was polite and respectful. We had many parents bring their children to see how the process worked, and after I showed them how the vote count went up by one after their parent’s ballot was cast, I made sure everyone got stickers. Heck, I made sure every adult got one!!

By the time the polls closed at 8pm, we were all exhausted and running on caffeine and adrenaline knowing that as soon as we gavelled ourselves closed, the next phase began. By 8:30 we knew there were no last-minute ballots from the drop box to count, so we shut down our tabulator, printed the unofficial results, and then while our inspectors made sure that all our ballots cast versus voters counted number matched, yours truly sat on the floor pulling ballots out of the tabulator bin to be stacked into piles of 50 once again, and also separating out the ballots that were unable to be read by the machine and needed to be hand counted, and all of the ballots with write-ins.

As a child of the Standardized Testing Era, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND how anyone at all does not grok Fill In The Bubble. We had a dozen or so ballots with checkmarks, halfhearted smudges, and oopsies that we tried to figure out intent. And there’s a special place in Hell for people who think they’re being cute writing in Wyatt Earp for Sheriff or Anyone But Her for a race with a candidate running unopposed. You didn’t get recorded; no, your vote literally went to Other and we despise you for taking up our time counting this stupidity fifteen HOURS after we showed up to work. Just leave the damned thing blank and your dislike of the candidate choice will be reflected by the count being lower than possible.

At 9:45pm my tabulator memory cards had been collected, our cast ballots had been locked into a box to be saved for 22 months, and a group of us walked together to our cars. It’s a satisfying feeling knowing you made democracy happen, and are kindred souls with thousands of other patriotic, detail-oriented pollworkers who don’t care what party you voted for, just that your single ballot was counted accurately. I can’t wait to do it again next year!

Time to head over and check out tonight’s Tops!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/14/2136183/-Top-Comments-My-Midterms-Pollworking-Experience-Edition

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