My day as an election judge

See Schmidlap's post for the more well-written story of his adventures:

The day dawned clear and bright…oh, wait, no it didn’t. Any day where I’m up at 3:30 am doesn’t “dawn,” and it was cloudy and misty all day. (It was the next day that was clear and bright.) There were four judges assigned to our precinct – two Democrats and two Republicans (by state law, you have to declare as a member of a party to be an election judge). I’d gotten a call from the other Democrat (call her Hillary – not her real name) the previous day telling me that she and the two Republicans (a husband and wife team – call them George and Laura) were going to set up as much as they could Monday at 5. I couldn’t join them, since I was still, you know, at work, but when I arrived at the precinct at 5 AM on Tuesday, everything short of the voting materials was set up, which certainly made the morning easier.

Hillary was waiting there at 5, which was good, since she had the key to the building – a church about a mile from my house (and yes, I spent a whole day in a church and failed to get smote even once). She and I carried the remaining materials – the ballots, the tabulator, etc. - into the building, but we couldn’t open them up without our compatriots from the other party. They showed up around 5:10, and we got everything up and ready by 5:45 or so. During the training, we had gone through how to do this, and the instruction cards were pretty straightforward. George wanted to just rush through everything, since he’d been a judge a number of times, but I took the direction sheet and we went through it step-by-step anyway. In our county, the ballots were all optical scan (fill in the bubbles), and were fed into a tabulator (essentially a Scan-tron machine, for those who know what they are). It would update the running count of ballots when one was inserted, and it would reject an overvote, so that the voter could get a new ballot and try again. Some people joked that it was a shredder, but nope – at the end of the day, all the ballots were there, ready to be kept as a paper record of the election. For voters who couldn’t fill the paper ballot out by hand for one reason or another, there was a Voter Assistance Terminal, which was a touch-screen machine that filled the ballot out for them. It could be set to have very large print, to read the ballot to the voter (through the accompanying headphones), to be controlled by a touchpad or with a paddle or puff tube, as on a motorized wheelchair. It was a pretty sweet device (although our first one didn’t work, and we had to get a replacement).

At 6 AM, the polls opened, and we had a few voters in line. There were four stations for judges, and by law we were required to rotate through them. We were actually one judge short of the optimal arrangement, but it worked out okay. Station 1 – greet the voters, have them fill out an “Application to Vote,” which was just a small form with their name, address, and signature. Station 2, which had to be staffed by one Democrat and one Republican, had the rolls of who was registered to vote in the precinct. We had to compare signatures, etc, with the records, and essentially approve the Application to Vote. Station 3 was giving the voters their ballot and explaining how to fill it out (fill in the bubbles next to the word Democrat…no, I’m kidding of course). Many voters complained that the new ballots were slower and harder to use than the punch-card ballots, but seemed to accept that it was better if they provided a more accurate count. Station 4 was at the ballot box, where we instructed the voters on how to insert their ballot and then gave them their “I Voted” sticker. Since we only had 4 people, and we had to have 2 at station 2, stations 3 & 4 were combined.

For the most part, the group of judges we had was a pretty good one. Hillary had done this before, but not in a few years, so she was a little rusty. George had been an election judge a lot, but Laura’s first election as a judge was the primary. George was also the most problematic of the judges (although nothing extreme). The two things he did that were the most obnoxious were early in the day, though, and it got better after that. We had two referenda on the ballot – one calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq (which passed both Champaign and Urbana pretty handily) and one calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney (which lost in Champaign, but passed Urbana, and passed overall – not that it will do us any good). I’d learned at the election judge training that Republicans didn’t just disagree with these referenda, but thought it was absurd they were even on the ballot. So, early in the morning, George and one of his neighbors were joking about “those silly things on the back of the ballot”, and both his wife suggested that he needed to stop – everybody was going to have a different opinion. The other thing was when he was the one showing how to use the ballot box, he’d stand a little too close, which meant that he could see the ballots as they were being inserted. Laura told him that he needed to give the voters privacy, which he thought was a silly idea, but eventually, as the rest of us did, stepped back and looked away as the ballots were put into the tabulator. Of course, especially with elderly voters, sometimes you’d have to steady something, and I’m sure everyone saw a few votes, but overall, privacy was respected.

The day went pretty smoothly. We had a steady stream of voters in the morning, which slowed down a lot in the afternoon. Of the 260 or so people we had vote (roughly 20 an hour), I’d say the average age had to be 50+. It’s a slightly older, conservative district, but few of the younger people who were even registered actually voted. (There was the younger woman who wanted me to put her “I Voted” sticker on her, and thrust her chest out towards me, but that was an exception. I was good.) The only real problem we had was with the VAT, but that got replaced, and a few elderly voters found it useful. If they had trouble using it, we could show them how, in D/R pairs. One older guy announced all his votes out loud as he touched the screen. Of course, when he asked me if Jesse White “was that black guy,” I informed him that we weren’t allowed to comment on the candidates at all. (That was universally regarded by the other judges as the best possible answer.)

We had no spoiled ballots, no provisional ballots, only one Federal-Only ballot (someone who moved within the county but failed to re-register), and had to send a few people away to other precincts, but that was it. We had one visit from two officers from Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office, and the woman from the county clerk’s office who was overseeing our precinct kept telling us how smoothly we were running things. We had no real attempts at electioneering (the story from above was the closest it got), no pollwatchers, and no arguments with voters.

The afternoon got kind of boring, but wasn’t too bad. I was just really tired, so boring was bad. Changing stations every hour and a half or so helped. We got (including early and absentee votes) roughly 70% turnout for a midterm election, which was great. There was some discussion of politics between George and I when there were no voters around, but nothing extreme (I didn’t get into my belief that not only should Chimpy and Dead-Eye be impeached, but hung next to Saddam somewhere that crows would eat their eyes). At 6:30 pm, we started taking signs down, and at 7, the polls closed. The tabulator prints out a report, one which stays attached to the “zero report” from opening, and is the official count, another one which gets posted on the door of the polling place, and two others which can be given to pollwatchers (if any are around). We signed off on them, closed up shop, and brought everything back to the county HQ. I made it home by 8:15, and was a TV junkie the rest of the night.

I will likely do it again, although it will depend on what future elections hold. If Barack Obama runs for president, and gets the nomination, I’d be more likely to be working for his campaign than at the polls, for example, but it was worth doing. I think that most localities need more judges than they have, so if you are pondering the idea, I’d say go for it. And hell, it’s $90.