After a couple of days to recover, here are the positives and negatives of Tuesdays stint as a Chief Election Judge: + We had the best and most plentiful food (from corporate donors) that Ive ever seen as a election judge. Particular shout-out to Balduccis Food Lovers Market, which donated crab cakes, chicken Wellington in puff pastries, stuffed mushrooms, and a variety of other gourmet treats. We had so much that none of the election judges bothered to bring their own food, we canceled our pizza order for dinner, and we still ended up taking home leftovers at the end of the day. - One of our election judges failed to show, and sent an e-mail only an hour and a half after he was supposed to be there. + An election judge who was supposed to be there only for the morning volunteered to stay for the whole day to make up the deficiency. - Several of our election judges lacked either the physical mobility or the confidence to handle escorting voters to the voting booths. As a result, I ended up having to take on that duty myself for almost all of the day, leading to a lot of soreness by the end. + I do seem to be healing gradually, so I doubt there will be any long-term physical effects. - There was some confusion about whether one person was supposed to be an election judge or just a student volunteer. He had trained as an election judge, but was only 17 and wanted to receive student service learning credit rather than pay for his service. + We decided to treat the person mentioned above as an election judge for all purposes other than payroll, and were well rewarded for our efforts. He was magnificent at every task assigned, and at taking on new tasks on his own initiative. - There is supposed to be one Chief Election Judge from each party. However, my Republican counterpart was not appointed until 3 days before the election, leaving me to complete the duties of both Chief Election Judges until then. And when they did finally appoint someone, it was someone who had never done this before, so there was a learning curve involved. + The other Chief Election Judge (once he was appointed) proved to be dedicated and detail oriented, and really helped keep us on track in the course of a very long day. - Two voting machined broke during the course of the day. One was a particular problem, because it was the one with the modem that we had to use to transmit voting results back to the Board of Elections. We sort of had to dissect it to get the modem out so that we could use a different voting machine for the transmission. Of course, we discovered that we would need to do this only after the machine in question had been placed on the cart, and a bunch of other machines stacked on top of it, so we had to pull all the other machines off it before we began the dissection. + Turn-out was light enough so that we managed with just the voting machines we had. - One of the candidates for governor voted in our precinct. I was instructed to keep the media from taking an photos near the voting machines. Every tried to keep 15 or so major media outlets at once from pointing their cameras the way they arent supposed to? I dont think its possible. + We had the voting machines set up in such a way that there was absolutely no way for any of the media to take pictures of someones actual votes on the touch screen of the voting machine. - The Democratic and Republican precinct chairs were supposed to give us certificates showing that they were authorized to be in the polling place as poll watchers/challengers. At least one of them was unable to produce the required certificate. + All of the Democratic and Republican precinct chairs are a minimum of 98 years old, and have been working that precinct since the dawn of time. So I was able to tell the Board of Elections that I recognized them all, and got permission to let them in anyway. Since these people primarily stay outside to engage in electioneering, and really come into the polling place only to leave food in the kitchen and then come back to get it later, I was glad not to have to ban them from doing so. - We had the usual difficult cases: the one who always tears her I Voted sticker in half to remove the Spanish language version (because she doesnt think it should be there); the ones that havent grasped the concept of a closed primary and dont register with a party, and then are mad when they can vote in only one race in the primary; the one with dementia who lost the slip entitling him to vote in the few seconds between when it was issued and when he was sent in to vote; the ones who cant remember which precinct they are supposed to vote in; etc. +++++++ The actual voting went smoothly. Everyone was able to get in, vote, and get out in under 15 minutes. Most of them didnt even have to wait in line for more than a minute. The League of Women Voters person sent to verify that we were following all correct procedures was very impressed with our operations. And we completed all of the detailed and complicated forms necessary to verify the security procedures. Just keeping my fingers crossed that the other Chief Elections Judge will come back in November, and that well have the experience to cope with the much larger turn-out we can expect then.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 23:11:20 +0000
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