OK, Gang, It's Go Time! The Pollworkers Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve noticed that many of us here are civic-minded sorts who are working the polls for our county/city governments tomorrow. Let’s meet and say hi and talk about our fears and hopes and preparations for the loooooong day tomorrow.

I’m working for the NYC board, in the county of the Bronx, as a Republican Inspector (I’m a registered Dem, but there’s so few Repubs they assign the designation randomly) and Chairman of my group. I have to report at 5:30 am and get off at 9:30 (officially) and get two meal breaks of one hour each. I’m working in a cafeteria/gym (it’s a cheaply built 1922 school and they just move the benches for dodgeball) with equipment cages against the windows and high ceilings and echoey granite acoustics. There’s four of us for each Big Hulkin’ Gray Machine o’ Freedom (aka 1964-era Shoup machines) and ten Electoral Districts, so with Commissioners, Doorkeepers, and the mandatory Bored Irish or Black Cop, there’s about fifty of us working the polls at this one site. We expect about five hundred voters each Shoup–the most I remember was 238 in the 2002 election.

My district is pretty Irish and Italian, very very white ethnically for the Bronx, and I don’t expect much trouble form the voters themselves–even the indignant ones restrain themselves in front of the mostly elderly sweet ladies who I work with. We have forms for people who have moved, people who are challenged, people who are spelled wrong, people who are supposed to be elsewhere, etc. But I am, needless to say, rather nervous about tomorrow. Usually it’s a long and extremely boring day, but this year…

So, what’s it like in your district?

2

Not working the polls, but I figure I’ll be dropping by PS 19 around 9 AM. You want I should bring you a cup of coffee, or something? :smiley:

3

Heh. Make it tea. A Doper Encounter on Election Day–wow! We’ll be lonely, so very lonely. And uninformed, since we can’t have the Net :eek: :frowning: or phones, or TVs and radios.

I’ll be at the ED 31 table. My name is Carolyn.

4

Cool. Wish I would be in a position to bring you some news, but it’ll be too early for that. At least I’m in the 25th ED, so it won’t be unseemly for me to stop by your table.

Btw, would you like milk/sugar/lemon with your tea? :smiley:

5

I’m not a poll worker, (IANAPW) but I want to thank Mehitabel and all you others who do this on election days. It’s a long, sometimes arduous, sometimes boring but much needed task. I early voted this year and the polling place was staffed by volunteers. They were great, making sure we filled out the early voter registration form and all.

Interesting side note: Almost 25% of the registered voters in my county early voted last week. I’m really curious as to what the turnout rate will be tomorrow.

6

Well, we’ve sent out absentee ballots already, but we have no early voting in NY State, so everybody has to traipse in tomorrow. At least the weather is supposed to be OK–kind of gray but not too rainy.

Thanks for the compliments! And milk and sugar, please :smiley:

I know there was a Texan pollworker around here–I’d be very interested to hear what it’s like for them.

Oh yeah, we have mandatory 3-hour training sessions at least once a year or every time there’s a major change in the laws. My last one was in late August before the primary. And I get paid $225 for the day–the check usually two weeks before Christmas, and it buys everybody’s presents.

7

I’m not working the polls tomorrow, but I am volunteering down at Kernan HQ (Dem. for Indiana governor) to work the phone bank. The hours are much more flexible, and it should be pretty exciting (hopefully).

8

I’m an election judge here in Seattle. I’ll leave the house before 5 am and return around 10 pm. As I’ve mentioned on other threads, I’m assigned to a single-precinct polling place, with just 3 poll workers. It’s in the basement of a large retirement home, and most of the voters live in the building.

Which reminds me–I’ve got to go to the dollar store after work tonight to pick up some cheap magnifying glasses. During the primary, some of the seniors had trouble reading their ballots, and I think I can spend 4 bucks or so to have some vision aids on hand. I’ll also need to pick up about 3 liters of Coke and Dr. Pepper to keep myself awake with.

We ran out of ballots during the primary (had to make up some color copies), so I hope my inspector raised enough hell over that to make sure they print up lots extra this time.

9

Aha, so you’re the ones with paper ballots! Ran out, yikes, that’s lousy. We usually end up dumping huge amounts of paper–unused affadavits and challenge oaths, the little white cards we fill out for each voter, info on voting procedures “Llene el ovalo!”, etc. at the end of the day.

I am lucky in the sense that my workplace is only three blocks from my house. Some of my co-workers, from other parts of da Bronx, have to take two buses to get there, leaving at 4 am or so.

Caffeine sounds good, but there’s enough clumsy cow-orkers that NYC forbids drinking at your table at all. We have to go to a kid-sized desk in the corner of the room to eat and drink secretively, like gerbils.

10

Yep, we have the lovely scantron-style ballots. I find it a little annoying to fill in the bubbles, but it has some great advantages: a recountable physical ballot, easy to understand, and the ballot box has a scanner on it that will reject ballots that are filled out incorrectly (such as two votes in the same race). The scanner is made by Diebold, but is not sneaky and evil like the all-electronic touchscreen gadgets I’ve heard so much about.

11

Inspired, I went out and got a 1.5 litre of diet Coke and some little chocolate chip cookies. Thanks!

12

OK, folks, I’m watching the top of the Daily Show and then it’s time for all pollworkers to be snug in their beds. I’m leaving my house at 5:15 tomorrow. I feel like a farmer.

And to all a good Election Day!

13

Just saw Mehitabel a little while ago, and she said to say she is doing just fine with an unprecedented turnout for her district. :smiley:

14

Hi again sunfish!

Anyway, I’m home. Now for the results:

Bush won on six out of eight machines by large margins, and Kerry won two by very slim ones. On my machine Bush got 171 votes, Kerry 125, and Nader 4. :frowning: We’ve got a lot of Reagan Democrats 'round here, and we are certainly not typical of da Bronx.

Only ten affadavit ballots were cast, mostly by friendly people who had moved and not re-registered in time. Only two people had to be denied the ballot due to the fact that they had moved not only out of the city, but several counties away; they both went away cheerfully to vote affadavit back home.

Number of challenges made directly to voters by anybody at all: None.
Number of lawyers lurking about: None.
Number of fights: None.
Number of poll watchers: Looked to be about twenty total. They stayed politely away, corraled by the Coordinator and the Mandatory Cop, until we workers had closed the machines, revealing their little plastic number totals, read them all out to each other while entering them on a paper spreadsheet, and then written the whole thing out in triplicate. They then peered at it and wrote down the results and went to the machines and squinted at numbers the size that the computer in DESK SET would have had.
Number of serious disputes: One. Some guy pulled the wrong lever for a state Senator and then asked the pollworkers for help. One of each party stuck their heads behind the curtain and one said “Sir, do you know what you’re doing?” which said person took amiss and started yelling, storming out of the booth instead of listening to the solution (just push the bad lever back up into place and pull down the one you want, takes a split second). Said idiot then went out and whined to a signholder for candidate of his choice. Signholder came in and said the man had been denied the right to vote for his candidate. Coordinator: No, he wasn’t, he never gave the pollworkers a chance to tell him how he could easily have voted for him. Well, can he vote affadavit? Signholder shown clause that if you vote on a machine, that’s it–if you make your vote final, that’s it.
Amount of flak and followup from incident: None.
Number of really rude people I got: around two.
Number of grumpy people: around ten total, nothing that couldn’t be easily dealt with. I told you that people in my neighborhood don’t curse around little Irish ladies, and at my table I had Bridey, a fine lady with a charming brogue and a universal grandma face, and Andy, a tall handsome retired businessman whose charm nobody could resist.
Number of press lurking: None.
Number of press mixed in with pollworkers: Around six, it appeared, none for any paper anybody would have heard of.
Number of inspectors from the Elections Board: One. She arrived around 6 pm and did a little exit-polling the voters about their experiences and then took off.

So. That’s it. No drama, little excitement, lots of camaraderie and bonhomie and sleep deprivation. Thanks to Bridey and Andy and the Regina and Ray, the Coordinators, and the other workers and the pizza guys and the Mandatory Cop(s).

We did it.

Now I need sleep, but I’ll be damned if I’ll get much tonight.