Signing Off

This is kind of a fast and dirty narrative about my day as a poll worker. When I process some of it, mentally, maybe I’ll polish it up a bit. Or not. Actually, probably not.


Signing Off
Originally uploaded by TokyorosaSigning Off

At the end of the night, all the precinct workers lined up to sign the results tape printed by the voting machine. One of those tapes was posted at the polling site, so I have no qualms telling you the following:

313 ballots were run through the machine, 9 mail-in ballots were dropped off at the polling place, and 5 "In Lieu Of" ballots (that is, people who had registered to vote by mail but whom either never received their ballots or who chose to not use them) and 2 provisional ballots (one for a woman who refused to go to her correct polling place and one for a young man who walked in, said he hadn't had time to register to vote and who wanted to vote anyway) were filled in (but not tabulated by the voting machine). 227 of the 313 whose ballots were run through the machine voted for Obama and 47 people voted for McCain.

According to the signature roster, there are 1069 registered voters in my precinct. They are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. 446 of them chose to vote early or by mail-in ballot, so with the 313 who voted at the polls, a total of 759 people voted (that doesn't include the provisional ballots). That's a 71% turnout, which I think is pretty good. That’s slightly higher than the national average this year apparently. Way to go, my precinct!

The set up was simple. We were assigned to an elementary school gym. Seven of us showed up to work the polls: A presiding judge, two election judges (of which I was one), and four election clerks. There were also three watchers and two (?) "challengers" assigned to the polls. Two of us were younger than about sixty-five.

Six of us arrived at six a.m. (one woman, not from this neighborhood, got lost) and began to set up the polling place, which included assembling the booths and automark machine, sorting through the paperwork, hanging signs, setting up the voting machine, and so on and so on. That took about forty-five minutes. Some guy showed up a little after six a.m. to vote and, informed that voting started at seven a.m., said he’d go get a cup of coffee. (He returned about twenty minutes later and stood alone until nearly seven when a police officer joined him in line to vote). After we set up, it was just a matter of being sworn in and choosing our jobs and then waiting until seven a.m. to open the polls.

I got one of the best jobs, checking the list of registered voters against the signature roster. I didn’t actually have to talk to anyone if I didn’t want to, and I could hand off my job to the woman who was giving out the ballots if I needed to go help someone else for a moment.

The woman to my right worked the signature roster. Since all our names were printed by precinct in the newspaper, I don’t think it matters that I tell you that her name was Pilar. Pilar was one of those people who knows everyone in the neighborhood and their children and their children’s children. She was perfectly bilingual and old enough to call everyone, even fifty-year-olds coming in to vote, mi hijo and mi hija. I loved to watch her yell out, "Next!" to the two-person line, then ask them for "su nombre, mi hijo," then find their name and say, "’Qui 'stan! Mira--sign here, mijo. Y ella tiene su ballote." Everyone in the line understood the Spanglish hybrid, which is straight from my childhood and which I find very comforting. A lot of the people stopped to chat with Pilar about their family and hers or about things going on at the church or about this and that. Sometimes they came around the table to hug her and give her a kiss.

As they signed the signature roster, I’d check them off on my roster and then write their voter number on a voting permit. I’d pass the permit off to the woman on my left, Monika, who was handling the ballots and she’d write the ballot numbers on the slip and give them some instructions and send them off to vote.

Between seven and eight in the morning, there were almost exactly one hundred voters but things ran very smoothly, I think. The other two hundred voters came over the next eleven hours. There was never, except when the poll first opened, a line. Most people waltzed right up to the table, ID in hand (which is not necessary in New Mexico), and signed in without waiting. Those that had to wait usually only did so because someone was gossiping with Pilar.

Here are a few of the people who came to vote:

A black woman of indeterminate age--but no spring chicken certainly--who had to vote on a provisional ballot because her registration had never been received. Her teenaged grandson, all over-sized hip-hop wear and hat turned backward, brought her in to vote (“It’s her first time”) and had to spell her name several times because, as he explained apologetically, she gets pretty mad. He spelled her name--a French name, complicated for New Mexico, used as we are to Spanish--and I wrote it down and then she jabbed with her finger and said, “X! Everybody leaves off the x!” Her grandson explained to me, “Her name has an x at the end. She’s creole. She gets real mad.” I told him that it was okay, people need to learn her name the right way and not spell it wrong to make it easy for them. They finally got her ballot and then they went and sat together at a table for a long time and when she was finished, we all thanked her for coming in to vote.

Another first time voter--again a young man in oversized hip-hop wear and, yes, a backward hat--came in with two young women, also teenagers. They explained that they had already voted, but they came with him so he could vote. After he got his ballot and went to a booth, the young women sat in chairs near the door. He marked his ballot but when he tried to run it through the machine, it was rejected. He had filled out one of the questions with two answers. We gave him another ballot and he went back to a booth to fill it out. After about ten minutes, he suddenly threw down his pen angrily and got up, “I messed up again,” he said. “I’m just going to go.” The two girls with him jumped up from their seats and pushed him back, protesting, “No! No! You can’t just go--you have to vote!” The woman handing out the ballots said to him, “We’ll get you another ballot--and your friends will wait for you as long as it takes, right?” The girls agreed. We got him another ballot, explaining that several people had done what he just did, and I said, here, let me show you this machine for marking the ballot. I led him over to the touch screen ballot marker that was originally meant for handicapped voters, but which can be used by anyone. (It had been placed in the corner because the presiding judge said that he didn’t know how to use it.) The kid was a wizard on the touch screen and was out of there in about four minutes, much to the delight of the two girls with him.

Several young mothers and fathers came in with their children or toting their babies. One little boy, all of about three years old, was very, very energetic. Like, chipmonk-level energetic. While his young, slightly worn-out looking mother talked to Pilar about the people they knew, the little boy ran in circles between the voting booths and the sign-in table. He was like a little hampster on a wheel, going round and round. He stopped to come over to say to us that did we know that people played basketball there, and, finding out that we did know that, he happily went back to running in circles. When his mom got her ballot, he looked for things to climb on and settled on climbing on his mom. She tried to sit him in her lap and then he tried to help her vote. Monika, the woman handling the ballots, went out and got a yellow sample ballot and a pen and told the little boy that he could vote on the ballot. He immediately climbed down from his mother’s lap, stretched out on his stomach on the gym floor at his mother’s feet, and set himself seriously to the business of marking up his ballot. After his mother put her ballot in the tabulator, she led him back to Monika to hand in his ballot, which was received with a sweet “Thank you for voting!”

A young girl approached the table, embarrassed. “Mom! Stop! Stop!” She turned to us and gestured at the older woman waiting for her in the doorway, camera in hand. “That’s my mom,” she explained, in that languid way of speaking unique to certain beautiful teenaged girls. “It’s my first time voting and she came down here with me because she wanted to take pictures.” I laughed. She looked over at her mother and rolled her eyes. She turned back to me and said, “Can you imagine what my first day of school was like? A nightmare. She’s always been like this.” As she left, we said, “Thank you--and thank your mother, too!” “God, don’t let her hear you say that,” she said.

About eight thirty, a young woman with messy hair, dressed in sweats and slippers came in, wiping sleep from her eyes. “I just got up,” she said. “I thought there was going to be a line.” She took her ballot to one of the booths and voted in her pajamas.

In the afternoon, a young man walked up to the table and said, “I never got a chance to register to vote, so what should I do?” I immediately offered him a provisional ballot, one of the scary ballots that are so often thrown out or challenged, and he accepted it. I didn’t tell him the scary part about provisional ballots and I didn’t try to give him a hard time at all, just took his information and told the presiding judge that he needed to cast a provisional ballot. (Pilar shook her head and, when the young guy was out of earshot, said, “I guess at least it's better if he votes, no? Those provisional ballots are just to make people feel good.”) He spent a long time over the ballot, which is the only thing that my suspicious self accepted as proof that he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on us.

A man in his fifties came in and said, “I want to see if I’m still registered here.” We looked him up on the roster and he was. “But I’m registered in Florida, too.” He said he hadn’t cast his vote in Florida, but he didn’t think he wanted to vote here. “You should vote,” the woman handling the ballots told him. He hesitated, “No, I don’t want to mess things up in Florida or here.” He seemed to have lost sight of the big picture, that voting was worth the mess he might have to clean up later over his dual voter registrations. He seemed kind of skittish and my instincts were to push him in the direction of not voting because of that. Instead, I handed him off to the presiding judge, suggesting that they call the election board. The election board official suggested that he had a right to vote, but that it seemed a little off that he was registered in two counties. In the end, he decided not to vote.

About that time, one of the watchers (a big, white-haired Republican in a Hawaiian shirt who looked me--in my cut off sweats and scuffed Doc Martens--up and down when he introduced himself to me and shook my hand) got up and left. When he arrived, he was wearing a lanyard with a big badge with his name and political party designation on it. It looked like he had printed the badge up himself, on his computer at home. He introduced himself to everyone, saying, “Hi, I’m Rich,” which led me to mock him to Pilar and Monika after he walked away. “Hi,” I said to them, “I’m a Republican, I’m rich--I have a lot of money. How about you?” He had hung around for a few hours gossiping with the old guys who were also working the polls, and then he left and was replaced by a woman who made me and my fellow poll workers absolutely Palin-livid. (More on her in a moment.)

In between voters, we ate. The experienced poll workers had shown up with donuts and cake and cookies and sandwich fixings and pickles and candy and sodas and thermoses of coffee. One whole table was placed near the voting machine and dedicated to food. Around lunchtime, two people came in with a thank you card signed by a couple of politicians and a cooler of drinks and a tray of sandwiches. As voters came in, I would shove into the front pocket of my hoodie whatever I had been in the process of shoving into my pie hole, so by the end of the day, my pockets were filled with crumbs, mostly from potato chips and granola bars. I kept a two-liter bottle of water on the floor under my chair, next to my own thermos of coffee, and whatever diet soda I happened to be drinking. (I had to pee so many times throughout the day that Pilar laughed at me. I recycled a line from my stepfather, saying as I drank from my bottle of water, “I’m just going to go pour this in the toilet and cut out the middleman.”)

Pilar got up and got a donut and some coffee. After a bit, she got a piece of coffee cake and some water. She ate some chips and hard boiled eggs. Then she had a sandwich and pickles. Then she ate a Snickers bar. “I have to eat all day,” she said. “The diabetes makes me so hungry. I have to keep my sugar up.” We talked about her diabetes and that led her to tell me sadly that she was starting to have trouble walking so she couldn’t travel so much anymore. She told me about her trips to Australia and Fiji and Mexico. “I want to go to more places,” she said, “but it’s so much walking. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Look at that guy,” she said, gesturing to her husband who was also a poll worker. The three post-retirement-age men had pulled their chairs into a circle near the voting machine. They were eating and gossiping, just like us. I wonder what they’re talking about, I said to Pilar. “Oh, the usual stuff guys talk about,” she said. “Who killed what deer and who caught what fish. And how many inches.” She meant inches of fish, but she stopped and laughed at herself anyway.

Monika took her cell phone and her Blackberry and began to email her family on the coasts to find out how things were going. A friend called her while he was waiting to ferry voters to and from polling places in, I think, California. Her father called from Wisconsin to say that things were going well at the polling place where he was. She tried to connect to the internet and failed, which was just as well. It was too early in the day for there to be any results, and I was happy in my no-news bubble. Honestly, no news came through. There was no radio and no television, and the people coming in were intent on voting or gossiping with Pilar. No one mentioned the candidates, no one tried to influence anyone in any way, except to encourage them or, in the case of the one or two people who came in without their mail-in ballots and who wanted to vote anyway, to go home and retrieve their mail-in ballots. “It’d be better if you got the ballot they sent you,” Monika told them. “Otherwise, your vote might not get counted, especially if it gets challenged.” She was successful in getting at least two people to go home and get their ballots and bring them back to us. Monika also reminded a couple of people that they couldn’t wear their Obama pins and stickers into the polling place.

I expected a rush at lunch and then again after five p.m., but none came. People trailed in, signed the roster and voted. A few people “spoiled” their first ballots--that is, they filled in more than one bubble for a question or they marked outside the lines--and were given second ballots. (Those first ballots were literally called "spoiled ballots," which makes The English Major Brain of mine ache.) A couple more people “spoiled” second ballots and had to fill in third ballots. I quietly reminded the presiding judge that saying, “Oh, they did it again!” within earshot of those people was not helpful.

At about four o’clock, Rich the Republican poll watcher was replaced, as I said, by another woman. She took a chair behind us without introducing herself. A few people came in and Pilar signed them up. Pilar, knowing everyone, asked a few people their addresses. “Ay, mijo, are you still on Los Arboles? Si? Pues you’re my neighbor!” She had been doing the same thing all day, of course. The watcher went over to the presiding judge and said something to him and he came over to us and said to Pilar, “Don’t ask them their address or say their address to them because that could make voter fraud easy.” I stuck my nose in and said that Pilar knew practically everyone in the neighborhood. The watcher piped up with something and I completely ignored what she said. I didn’t even turn around to look at her, as we had been told that watchers were in no way supposed to interfere with the process. I knew she had turned us in to the presiding judge and it had pissed me off that this woman had waltzed in, ten hours into our fourteen hour day, and started immediately trying to tell us that what we were doing was wrong. The presiding judge said, “Oh, I know, but if it’s someone she doesn’t know and she gives them the address, they could just say, ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ and that would be voter fraud if they weren’t that person.” Both Pilar and I looked at him and said nothing. He wandered away.

Pilar leaned over to me and said quietly, “She’s the one who put the finger on us.” Mmm-hm, I agreed. Pilar said quietly, “She’s the type who always has to know who farted when and where.” I laughed and said loudly, “Well, you can tell her I did, earlier, over there near the voting machine.”

And then the election results started to come in. Dave sent me a text message. I read it to Pilar and Monika (“Obama 145, McCain 39”) loudly, knowing that it would probably piss off Republican woman who had turned us in to the presiding judge. “Shhh,” Pilar said, “You’re going to piss her off.” I said, “I didn’t say anything about who I’m supporting. I’m just giving the numbers. That’s all.” Pilar and Monika laughed.

And then suddenly it was seven p.m. and the polls were closed.

Pilar and I had a bunch of paperwork to do. Each of the rosters had to be counted and matched against the talies from the presiding judge. Then each blank signature line, indicated someone who hadn’t voted, had to be crossed out. While we talied, other people were busy ripping up unused ballots and tearing down signs. The Republican watcher woman read the tally off the voting machine tabulator and came over to me and said, “Did you get a count yet?” I didn’t look at her while I answered, “We’re actually still working. Aren’t you supposed to just be watching?” She didn’t answer me, but she didn’t come back again either.

I came up with a number on the adding machine and it didn’t match the number Pilar came up with adding things by hand. I had her read her numbers to me and I came up with a number that matched my number. “No, that can’t be right,” she said. I laughed. “No, it’s right,” I said. She added hers up by hand again. It was a completely different number from mine and from her first number. There were other numbers to be filled out--the last unused ballot number and the first used ballot number and the tabulator number and the number of provisional ballots and the number of “In Lieu Of” ballots and--Pilar gave in and accepted my total and we did the rest of the math and then we had to sign everything. All the tapes and the rosters. All of it. I reminded the presiding judge that he had to hand off a couple of things to someone else to drop in the mail and he wavered, then finally gave me the ballot box key (!), which is against the law for him to take along with the ballot box.

And then it was done. Pilar gave me a hug and said goodnight and I said goodnight to her and to everyone, and I came home and ate tacos with Dave, and we watched the election returns and I cried along with everyone else.

I'd do it again, too.