Advertisement

Working at polls: no political party

Share
Times Staff Writer

I left for the polls armed with a padded folding chair and a Lazy Susan. These were not creature comforts for standing in line -- I had voted absentee weeks before -- but rather for my first-time duty as an election judge in Montgomery County, Md.

Like teachers buying school supplies to supplement education budgets, we had been advised that seating might prove uncomfortable during a 15-hour day, and that turntables could expedite handing the official register over for voters to sign.

Montgomery County is about as close as you can get to the District of Columbia and still be in Maryland. It tilts liberal -- Democrats enjoy a 2-1 advantage over Republicans -- so the Board of Elections, required to have bipartisan teams of poll workers, reaches out to Independents like me to resolve the imbalance. That is how I came to find myself arriving at the Christ Lutheran Church in Bethesda with my kitchen gear.

Advertisement

Up at 4:45 a.m. to be at the poll by 6, I was excited and happy to be part of the process. When the polls opened at 7, voters were lined up waiting. From 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., my teammate (an artist, and a Democrat) and I processed about 300 voters -- almost one a minute. I checked their voter authorization card, she checked the voter register. She had them sign the register while I coded the card that would enable voters to cast their ballots electronically.

One of the most uplifting aspects of the day was coding the electronic card for those with failing eyesight so the ballot appeared on screen at 33% increased size. I thought this larger-than-life ballot was one of the great unsung advantages of the electronic computer screens.

Voters during the morning rush seemed dedicated, many expressing stalwart pride at having waited up to two hours. It was gratifying to see so many first-timers -- we knew they were new because the Board of Elections had coded the register to flag us to do extra ID checks -- and they too seemed thrilled to be participating. Young mothers came with their babies. Older women came with their walkers. Parents brought their children to teach them democracy, and when we could we took time to engage them, to ask them what year they would be eligible to vote.

By 12:30, I was literally shaking. For 5 1/2 hours, I gave my all to democracy. No food. No water. No bathroom breaks. Just greeting the voters, processing their names, checking their IDs where necessary, coding their cards. By the luck of the draw, my co-worker and I had been given the alphabetical L-R line and it proved by far the busiest.

Later, a voter came by, an academic, who told us she had waited to vote until later in the day because her last name started with M and it was a well-known fact among linguists that in almost any language there are more last names that start with L-R than any other group. I wondered if anyone had mentioned that to the Board of Elections.

By day’s end, the A-D desk had processed 384 voters, the E-K desk, 494 voters, the S-Z desk, 338 voters and we, on L-R, had tallied 532 voters. At various points in the day, elections officials would go outside to the waiting lines and yell, like barkers, “No waiting for A through D. No waiting for S through Z.”

Advertisement

It was a good turnout -- about 73% of the precinct’s 2,400 voters cast ballots -- but the after-work-hours rush that election officials had anticipated never materialized. Our last voter on the L-R desk came in on unsteady feet. My co-worker was sure it was vodka. I wondered if he had fortified himself with liquor to help him reach a decision -- one of the truly undecided voters.

No one famous came through, though I kept an eye out. I asked, “Are you related to Sen. Lieberman?” “Do you know the Olson twins?” “Mr. O’Neill, did you know Tip?”

Throughout the day, the precinct attracted Official Visitors. Some were observers from the European Union. One poll worker found this objectionable, reasoning that, “We’re not Bosnia.” There were students from American University, I suppose working on the ultimate term paper. There were privacy experts to monitor the electronic voting machines they viewed with suspicion.

With 275 precincts, Montgomery County (population: 900,000) needs more than 3,000 workers each year. The Board pays minimum wage -- $120 for the day -- but few do this for the money. Most of my colleagues were women, most in their 50s, most volunteering for the first or second time. One marveled that she was now old enough to work the polls, as her mother once had.

For most of the day I figured I would do it again. Until the evening. After the polls closed. That’s when the agony began.

Each team of check-in judges had to reconcile the number of voters who had signed the register with the number of Voter Authorization Cards we gave them to present at the voting machines. After collating the VACs by party, my colleague and I believed we had processed 130 nonaffiliated voters (most Independents, although we had a Libertarian or two), 124 Republicans and 274 Democrats -- not counting the provisional voters, who were being tallied off-machine. Two problems. Some of the VACs for voters we had signed in were missing -- and a supervisor speculated that perhaps voters had walked off with them. Another was that the voting machine judges said we had processed 532 voters -- four more than we could account for.

Advertisement

We did not cheat. As far as we knew, we hadn’t let anyone vote who wasn’t supposed to. We probably made a clerical error at some point, but the chief judge would not let us leave. The clocked ticked.

I looked around and my mind flashed to 40 years earlier, when my father took me to a precinct in North Hollywood, where we lived, to watch the workers count the ballots. They were mostly women, mostly using paper and pencil. And despite remarkable advances in technology in the decades since -- from fingerprints to eye prints, from computers to calculators -- we, mostly women, were counting and recounting, using the five-stick hatch marks that we had learned in childhood.

Finally, we were allowed to leave, accounts still unbalanced. My patient boyfriend drove me home, where I arrived by 9:30 p.m., with my chair and my Lazy Susan, both unneeded. Next time, I think I’ll bring a calculator.

Advertisement