On Tuesday I promised a long-form report about working this election, so here it is.
We arrived at 7 AM, an hour before the polls opened at 8, in order to get all the machines turned on and running properly, as well as having legally-required signage posted, supplies laid out and ready, and get us sworn in again. (We all had to swear in at our required pre-election class, as well.)
There were six of us this time, all ladies; two I’d worked with before — C and E — and three I hadn’t — our Precinct Officer (PO), B and A. C and E were on the registrar’s table. B and A were at the ballot table. PO was at her own table, and I was sitting by the scanner.
Here’s a sketch I made of our polling station layout:
Most voters came through the doors at the bottom on the left, but some came in through the ones on the right. They’d head toward the PO’s table, and she’d have them fill out the ballot application form. Then they’d move on to the Registrar’s table, where we’d look up their name in our signature book (voter roll). We’d verify the information and add in the ballot application number and our initials and have them sign the book. Then they’d take their ballot application to the ladies at the ballot table, who gave them their ballot and instructions on how to fill it out. Voters were directed to the voting stations, which were tables with privacy screens set up so they could keep their choices secret. Once finished, they’d head to the scanner where I’d assist them as needed. The S in the sketch is scanner, the P is printer, and AW is “accessibility writer,” which is a machine we use with voters who don’t see well or are blind. (It has a headset so you can hear the selections and make your choice, which is recorded and then printed out on a printer, so that you have a paper ballot to scan, just like everyone else has.) We also have a magnifying sheet if you left your reading glasses at home. 😀
We didn’t have any voters who needed to use the AW this time, but a couple needed the magnifying sheet.
If our PO got busy like calling the Election Commission for a question or whatever, then I’d cover for her.
One item we’re given in our supplies is a roll of “I Voted” stickers, which you have to tear apart. So that was one of my pre-poll-opening jobs. (Those are the toes of my shoes at the right side of the shot.)
By around 7:30 we had people showing up. We told them they’d have to wait until 8. By start time, we had about 20 people lined up to vote. (And the very first person in line was a woman!) Everyone was patient and understanding. But none of us had ever seen a line waiting at opening time for this precinct, so we all thought that was encouraging.
We had about 35 people in the first 30 minutes cast their ballots. We continued to have pretty steady flow throughout the morning, though not as heavy as that initial onslaught. We had very little downtime all day… maybe five or ten minutes here and there. Usually you’ll get lulls, like after the first hour it’ll be pretty dead for an hour or so, then pick up around 11:30 as people take off lunch to go vote. Then it usually dies down after 1:00 and is calm for another hour or two. But, as I said, this time we didn’t have extended lulls like that. We had trickles at least all day long. I’d brought a small project to hand sew with me for the downtime. Never had the chance to touch it. 🙂
I was stationed at the scanner this time. The scanner has a privacy shield on each side of it, so that voters can keep their selections secret. We’re trained to stand or sit near the back end of the machine, so that we can’t see the ballots. We’re basically there to instruct voters how to insert their ballot into the machine and to be handy in case there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. More about all that later…
I came up with my own script which went something like this, “One sheet at a time. It doesn’t matter how you put it in.” Once they started their ballot through the machine, they’d want to feed the second sheet in too early, and I’d have to tell them to wait until they see the flag on the screen and then they could feed the second sheet through. Then I’d say, “When you see the flag again, you’ve cast your ballot, and I’ll trade you a sticker for your pen. (That usually made them smile.)
An election judge stopped by around 10:00 AM to check on us (they always drop by to do that, as well as make special trips if there’s an issue). He glanced around at us and said we had our full complement of workers, which was good, because a lot of precincts were understaffed. (I’m not surprised. When I had my pre-election class on Saturday — it was the last opportunity to take the class — Deborah, who works for the Election Commission said she was expecting over 150 more people than had arrived. As in, that was everyone who hadn’t shown up to a previous session. So I wonder now if they knew they weren’t going to work and skipped the class. :shrug:) The election judge asked how it was going, and I told him we’d been pretty busy, with around 100 voters already. He glanced at the scanner screen and confirmed. (The scanner’s count was 102 or 103. I didn’t know the scanner kept a count that anyone could see… I’d been keeping track by counting noses as they stopped at the ballot application table. Derp!)
Around eleven-ish when we’d gotten quiet again, our Precinct Officer said if anyone wanted to have their lunch, we could. So I accepted the offer, since I had a headache and needed to take something for it.
We were set up in a teacher’s breakroom/cafeteria, and an art room was at the far end. I had lunch in there, and almost as soon as I started my lunch, we had people coming in again. Oh well…
We had a number of voters who required a fail safe procedure. What that means is there’s some issue. Most common was they had moved but didn’t know if they were registered in our precinct or another one. Second most common reason for the fail safes was a name change. Third was they just weren’t in our signature books (voter rolls) for some reason or other. Every time a fail safe had to be done, our Precinct Officer had to call someone at the Election Commission to verify the voter was registered and then it had to be determined if they could vote at our precinct or if they had to be sent to another. (Voters can vote at any open precinct during early voting, but must vote at their home precinct on Election Day.) Near the end of the night, our Precinct Officer said she’d never had to do so many fail safes during any previous elections. So, yeah… we had a lot of people who weren’t regular voters or who didn’t keep their registrations current who wanted to vote in this particular election.
I felt really badly for one lady. She was African American, middle-aged, and she came to our precinct but wasn’t in our book. So we did the fail safe and made the call to Deborah at the Election Commission. We thought we’d found her correct precinct and sent here there. Around 7 PM, she returned, having gotten the run-around at at least two more precincts; so she was understandably frustrated and distraught. She was very worried she wouldn’t get to vote.
We had to send her to yet another (different) precinct, but at least it was less than two miles away, but she didn’t know where it was or how to get there from our precinct. She was talking to another voter in line who volunteered she knew where it was, and at this point, it’s 7:30, and she’s really worried she won’t get to cast her ballot. I assured her if she was in line by 8 PM, she would get to vote, regardless of how late it was. Then I offered to look up the location on my phone for her and get the directions so she could get there. I handed her the phone so she could study it. When she gave it back to me, she gave me a very heartfelt thank you. She had tears welling in her eyes as she said it. I wished her good luck and hope she got to vote!
But that just goes to show how important voting was to her, to spend hours going from one precinct to another. How many people would’ve just given up?
In spite of issues like that, we didn’t have a single voter who was angry or rude. Many people thanked us as they were leaving, or at each station as they went through the room. And I can tell you, we appreciate every time someone shows us that kindness. We don’t do this for any accolades, but it’s nice to know our service is recognized.
I didn’t mention in my last such report, but we had one rude lady at the primary, and I saw her again on Tuesday. But where in August she came in with a sour expression, this time she was all smiles. (She was a lady at least in her 70s, maybe a little older…) Anyway, I saw her heading toward my station and gave her one of my winning smiles as I gave her the spiel. (“One sheet at a time. It doesn’t matter how you put it in.”) She got the first sheet through, but on the second one, the scanner made that dreaded clunky sound which signaled a problem. So I told her, “Don’t take out the sheet, just tell me what it says on the screen.” (Because, I’m not allowed to look at the screen myself, unless the voter says it’s okay. Because… voter privacy.) And any time the machine starts squawking at someone with red lights flashing, their natural inclination is to reach for that paper and pull it out. When they do that, the screen instructions go away.
Anyway… I asked her to read the screen for me. It said she had a mark the scanner couldn’t read. I asked her if she might’ve gotten a stray mark somewhere on the paper? She looked and said, “No.” We tried again, and got the same error. So then she said, “I started to mark this box, and then decided to mark the other one” as she showed me her ballot. I made a point of just looking at those two boxes and not anything else. But, sure enough, she had a tiny mark in the “no” box and a filled “yes” box, which is what upset the scanner. So I told her she had two options. She could have the machine accept the ballot “as is” and possibly not have that answer count, or we could spoil her ballot and she could do that sheet over (it was the two-page sheet of our three-page ballot). She opted to spoil it, so I sent her over to the Precinct Officer, who started the process to spoil her ballot.
The way we handle spoiling a two-sheet ballot is they hand over the sheet to be spoiled. Then we have the ladies at the ballot table tear off another 2-sheet ballot. The voter is handed the same page that they made the mistake on so they can fill that out, and we mark “spoiled” on the empty extra sheet, as well as on the sheet with the mistake. (This is done so that we end up with a complete ballot that’s spoiled and a complete ballot that goes through the scanner and into the ballot box below it. In her case, one sheet had already gone through, so that page wasn’t an issue.)
At some point in all this activity, someone mislaid one of the two sheets (I think it was the sheet she’d marked incorrectly.) and that had to be found before we could send her back to the voting stations to fill out her responses again. But all through this she was patient and smiling. She finally got back to me and we went through the process again with success! Yay!
Maybe when she was so surly in August, she was just having a bad day. So I guess I won’t refer to her as “Mrs. Crabapple” anymore… LOL
Another issue that would cause the scanner to squawk at us was leaving something blank. I’d have to ask, “Did you intend to leave that blank or did you just not see it?” Sometimes they intended to leave it blank, so I’d tell them to click on the box that says, “Cast ballot as is,” and the machine would then suck it through. Other times they’d say they didn’t know there was something on the back, so they’d have to return to the voting stations and fill that out. It was always the same page they missed…
Another problem was the mark being too small, as in not filling up the intended box. Another was “Can’t read the bar code,” which was caused by the page not going straight through the scanner, but heading through at an angle. The final issue only happened once; it was apparently because the scanner had been so busy that it needed time to process. It paused for 30 seconds to a minute, and then was back scanning everything.
As for the barcodes: there are four barcodes on each side of each page; these basically just help the scanner orient itself to which end of the page and side of the sheet it’s looking at, so that it can properly interpret the marks on the pages and turn them into votes in the tally.
I had at least three people ask “how do I know this machine is recording my vote right? Because, we all know they don’t always…” I had to avert my eyes and keep my lips firmly shut in those instances. (Avert my eyes so they couldn’t see me roll them…) One older guy appreciated how “slick” this scanner was. “No more voting by mail, right?” he asked. “It’s an option,” I replied, without saying anything more.
It’s not easy for me to suffer fools, but I managed it.
One older man was in a wheelchair, with an assistant pushing him along. When he reached my station, I went through my script again. (Say it with me! “One sheet at a time. It doesn’t matter how you put it in.”) He started to put both sheets in so I repeated “One sheet at a time.” He grinned and said, “I’ve got my sheet together!” We both giggled a little.
We had a lot of young parents bringing their children in to vote. And every time we had a young ‘un, I’d give them an “I Voted” sticker. We also had a couple of people come in with their dog. Saying hi to the pups was a nice change of pace!
We had a very large increase in women at our precinct this time. Many, many younger women age 20-40. All excited to vote; some grimly determined. A few were first-timers and asked my forgiveness at being slow or whatever. I told them they were doing just fine. One of the first-timers was a woman in her 50s. Before she put her ballot through the scanner, she was flipping through it and asked, “I didn’t see the amendment on abortion.” I told her there wasn’t one.
So it was pretty clear what had motivated her to vote, even though she was probably past the age to need one herself.
Another woman I would’ve pegged as a republican (older white woman, dressed for comfort and utility rather than style; I’d learned during the primary that the Rs in this precinct were older, long-time residents of modest means, while the Ds are usually young urbans with an arty or cool vibe in their dress and appearance) asked me after she’d put her ballot through, “How busy have you been?” “Very,” I told her, giving her the rounded number we’d had come through at that point. She was very glad to hear we’d been so busy and added, “This is very important.” I’m pretty sure she was there for women’s rights, too. She also added that she’d never seen this precinct this busy in all the years she’d voted there. Another woman putting her ballot through the scanner agreed. The funny thing was, when they were there, we were pretty light compared to the rest of the day.
Near the end of the day, C approached me. As I mentioned, I worked with her before at the primary. She’d complimented me at that time about how quickly I picked up tasks. This time she said, “I’ve been watching you throughout the day, and just wanted to tell you how good you are with the voters. You’re very kind and patient and you don’t hover over them.” Then she related that when she’d early voted — we were all strongly encouraged to early vote so we wouldn’t need to take care of that on Election Day, especially since they don’t normally assign people to their home precinct– the guy at the scanner had been standing beside her, crowding her. She asked him to give her some space. Anyway, she added that she liked how I handled everything. I told her I was so careful with the voters because when I early voted (this happened during the primaries as well as the general two years ago), I had issues with my ballot. At the time, I didn’t know the word for it, but I wanted to spoil my ballot. Rather than listen to me and help me spoil the ballot, the lady at the scanner just talked over me, insisting I needed to just press “cast my ballot as is.” I didn’t want a single voter to be treated like that, rushed through, not listened to, and leaving without properly casting their ballot.
Around 6 PM our Precinct Officer was calling the Election Commission once again about a fail safe. Deborah was in an emergency meeting while she was answering our PO’s call because a few precincts were out of ballots already.* It seems that the Election Commission hadn’t expected such heavy turnout when they were putting together everyone’s supplies. We’d been given 400 ballots at our location (precincts are given ballots based on past numbers of voters there), and by 4 PM we’d already had 250+ ballots cast, and a few spoiled. By 6 PM, we were on our last two pads of pre-printed ballots. (Each pad was 100 sheets, which equals 50 ballots.) We weren’t entirely sure we’d have enough, but we did. Thank goodness!
* There’s a mistake in that article I linked and it’s that we only have 78 precincts in Knox County, not 90+.
We ended up with over 350 ballots cast at our location. For sake of comparison, we had less than 130 ballots cast during the August primary. I was once again the closest guess to the number of ballots cast, and even I was too low this time! (I guessed 324.)
The last twenty minutes or so was very quiet, once the final rush of people had gone through. We only had one more voter come to vote, about five minutes before close of polls. We told her to take as much time as she needed; we were in no hurry. Once we announced the polls were closed, the others started packing up, but I had to wait by the scanner for our final voter. So we began and ended with the ladies. That should tell you something!
Once she was gone, we shut the doors and ran the tally tapes. (We inadvertently ran 4 tally tapes on the scanner instead of 3. No harm, though!) Then we shut down all the machines, placed the seals on them, pulled the ballot bin from the plastic box the scanner sits on top of, and then folded up the plastic box. The PO and another election worker placed the seals on the gray ballot bag as well as the orange bag where provisional ballots, spoiled ballots, and the stubs from the ballot pads are placed. I was given the task of witnessing that the seals had been placed and that they were secure. We finished up about ten minutes to nine. The PO and B drove the ballots and other equipment to the City County Building so that our precinct’s tally could be added to all other precincts in the county.
If you followed the link about running out of ballots at some precincts, then you know those precincts had to stay open until all voters had cast their ballots. Which is yet another reason why people can’t expect all the votes to be counted on election night by midnight.
Anyway, that was my day.