What I Saw While Working the Polls

Pages and Frames on Election Day

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Marlow tells of how, as a child, he would point to a blank spot on a map and say, “When I grow up, I will go there.”  I never had Marlow’s wanderlust, but I was as fascinated by the sample ballots my parents received in the mail as he  was by maps.  I would open them up, flatten them out on the kitchen table, and read every name printed in capital letters.  I wasn’t an aspiring politician but I remember being impressed that these people had their names on it and that people could go into a curtained booth and pull the levers.  It seemed like raw democracy, yet another cool thing the adult world kept from us.  

I was not a kid in 1920—but look at all of these names!

Charles Foster Kane thought it would be fun to run a newspaper; I always thought it would be fun to work at a poll on Election Day.  I’d hear people say things about the long hours, low pay, and the boredom, but just being involved on the most far-out of margins still seemed pretty exciting, like being on a movie set and bringing the second assistant camera operator a coffee.  So I called my county’s board of elections and was added to a list.  I got the call a week before Election Day telling me that I had to attend one night’s training for two hours, after which I would be ready to work.  I’d get paid $300 for the day (5:15 AM-8:45 PM with an hour break), but the money wasn’t the point. I just wanted to see how it all worked. The person from the Board of Elections assured me that the polling place was easy to find.  I said I would just load the location in my phone; she repeated that it was easy to find and gave me some rough directions, assuring me that it was a simple drive.  She thinks I’m ninety occurred to me as we spoke.   

The trainer showed us how to assemble the machines, where to place the routers, and how to set up the room. The big pollbooks with matching signatures had been replaced by electronic ones, which looked like the iPads on swivels found in bakeries and delis and that people sign with their fingers. Each pollbook was connected to a printers that would print long paper ballots; we also learned about the packs of little cards called ATVs—Authority to Vote slips. I learned how to take someone’s information: after typing in the first four or five letters of the last name and perhaps the first, the screen would tell me if the person was ready to vote, in the wrong polling place (which usually just meant they had to move to another table), or not registered. I was impressed by the level of organization. It took the full two hours and when someone came in twenty minutes late, he was told he had to stay after class. On the way out, I asked the trainer if each polling place was staffed by a combination of veterans and novices like me; he told me not to worry. I still did.

The night before Election Day, I couldn’t sleep because I had what Rooster Cogburn calls the jimjams. At about 2:00, I woke and moved to the couch, trying to use Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a soporific. But the part I was reading after opening the book at random turned out to be too interesting and connected to the current moment:

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate, without an indignant smile, that, on the father's decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself; and that the bravest warriors and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colours, but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession, independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master.

Gibbon kept me awake for a while, but eventually he had the desired effect.

At 4:00, I made coffee and drove to the polling place: an elementary school. There were eight of us there, five or six of them knew each other from past polls. It was like a little reunion. The clear leader was a woman with a red, white, and blue T-shirt and sweater; her second in command was another woman whose no-nonsense approach made me glad she was there. Each polling place is mapped out beforehand by the Board of Elections, so we had a map of how the place should look, but we found that the room we were assigned (the school library) would be far too small. So we moved to the gym and set up there. We had two long tables with two electronic pollbook workers at each one and two voting booths on the other side of the gym. Each electronic pollbook had a number of wires that had to be connected in the right way, like the opposite of how action heroes diffuse bombs, but again, the whole thing was well-organized and all of the cords were color-coded. It was the opposite of assembling cheap furniture with an Allen wrench. We put all the signs outside and in the hallways to direct voters to the gym. People started coming in at 5:50; at 6:00, we were able to take our first voters.

I was stationed at one of the tables. The other worker with me was there with his wife, who was working at one of the booths. They resembled, in appearance and demeanor, Ray Barone’s parents, sometimes yelling at each other across the gym (which had a killer echo) but without the Barones’ level of anger. In my head, I called them Frank and Marie. At 6:15, someone who knew Frank came to our table after he voted, pointed his thumb at Frank and asked me, as all older guys do, “Is this guy behaving himself?” I laughed and said yes. He then asked me my name.

“Dan,” I said.
“Stan?” he asked.
“Dan.”
“Stan!” This time louder.
“No, Dan.”
“Stan or Dan?”
“Dan! Dan!” Frank said.
“WHAT’S GOING ON OVER THERE?” Marie yelled across the gym.

Every few minutes, Frank would ask me if I wanted some almonds, which he ate from a big bag. He asked the voters, too. Whenever someone brought a little kid, one of the poll workers had a bag of leftover Halloween candy from which the kid could choose a treat. Another poll worker brought out a bunch of bananas. Another went to Dunkin with a slip listing some of Frank’s favorite donuts. The line of voters was pretty steady, but during lulls I would chat with Frank or read. I had just started Al Pacino’s new biography (reviewed here) and Frank read from a small book of prayers disguised as poems.

We had four electronic pollbooks in action, two for one district and two for another. My job was to ask a person’s name, type in the first few letters, and wait. Our state forbids the asking for IDs when people vote, but we could use their licenses if voters handed them over without our asking. If they did, we could scan the back of them to populate our screens. The same was true if people handed us their sample ballots, which contained barcodes we could scan.

As I knew from my training, if the screen turned green, the person was ready to vote and in the right place. I’d ask them to sign the screen with their finger or with one of the handy styluses we had in a basket (which Frank repeatedly advised people that they could keep) and would issue them a ballot: one of those long strips of paper. They’d bring these ballots and ATV tickets to one of the booths, hand them to a worker there, and then cast their votes. Some voters were told that they were issued a mail-in ballot that was never returned. Their reaction was usually, “I didn't get a chance”; a few said that they wanted to be taken off of the mail-in list. No problem—these folks were issued provisional ballots. They could still could use the machine but there was a short form they had to complete—a provisional ballot—to let the board of elections know to use the vote they cast today. Wanting to use the voting machine rather than the mail-in ballot made sense to me not because of conspiracy theories about voting machines or fraud, but because there’s something satisfying about using the actual machine that you don’t get from mailing in a form.

A handful of people thought they could register and vote on the same day, but they were about a month too late. One of these was a guy who resembled Jeff Lebowski in appearance and demeanor and just said, “Bummer.”

Over the course of the day, I read half of Pacino and processed about 300 people. Almost nobody was turned away and if they were, it was only because of no registration or, in one case, not a citizen. We sometimes had to call the Board of Elections to determine why someone was not on the rolls; these cases were resolved quickly.

The dedicated router sometimes made the pollbooks lag; whenever this happened, I would smile and tell the person that it wasn’t me causing the delay. But everybody was patient and almost everyone smiled back. There were times when the routers seemed like they were powered by social awkwardness. I filled the seconds of waiting with smalltalk. I spoke to one guy with a Buc-Ee’s shirt about the greatness of their brisket; another guy had a Grateful Dead T-shirt and we talked about the recent passing of Phil Lesh; another guy told me the styluses looked like the candy cigarettes we all used to see in stores everywhere in the 70s. A woman from Ghana told Frank that she was now a citizen and this was her first election. A few people brought their dogs and we would ask them about their names or breeds. These weren't deep conversations, but were to fill twenty seconds while we waited for the router to kick in. The question I was asked more than any other was, “Do I get a sticker?” I would always smile and say that they would get the “I Voted” sticker after they actually cast their votes.

Vote with ‘em if you got ‘em

One of the poll workers recognized a voter, a young man who went to high school with her son and who had walked an incredibly long distance to get there; she gave him a ride home on her lunch break. I learned from her later that her son was in a terrible car accident with him, an accident so bad that her son was in a coma for two months. He’s now OK, but that story was one of those items that the universe drops in our paths to remind us to not complain.

We had to make tally marks on a piece of paper for every voter that we processed and every provisional ballot we issued; this served as a double-check to the amount of votes cast. Frank would yell to his wife across the gym in the rare moments when the place was empty:

“Hey! Are you WORKING over there?”
“What?
“I SAID ARE YOU WORKING OVER THERE?”
“I can’t hear you! I have a headache!”
“A what?”
“I HAVE A HEADACHE!”

There were about 1,100 registered voters in my assigned district; by 8:45 AM, 7% of them had voted. By 11:30 AM, it rose to 15%; at 4:30 PM, my table was up to 25% and when we closed at 8:00, our table had processed 34% of the possible voters. We shut the door and began disassembling the pollbooks and booths, which took about 45 minutes.

The big takeaway from the experience wasn’t the $300 or what Frank called, without irony, “doing your civic duty,” although both of those are fine rewards. The takeaway was the epiphany I had on the drive home at 8:45 while listening to election coverage: everybody—the other poll workers, school custodians, election observers from the county, and voters—was unbelievably pleasant. Everyone was on not only their best behavior, but cheerful. It was like being at work the day before Thanksgiving: everybody is in a better mood because they know they will be off the next few days and spending time with their families. Not a single person complained or even scowled, and I live in a state where drivers never let other people merge into traffic and will let the door to a store slam in the face of a little old lady with her hands full. It was like living in a Norman Rockwell painting for a day and I wondered if this was the real America or just a pause from it. Our media fosters the rancor and division about which it continuously complains, but I didn’t see any of it for the fourteen or so hours I worked there during an election preceded by campaigns as rough as any I’d seen. I’m shocked to say that it’s too bad that the other 364 days can’t be as filled with good feelings as those I witnessed on Election Day.

As we left the school and all said goodbye, Marie told Frank, “I feel them epsom salts on my feet already.” There’s a metaphor there, but I can’t work it out.