Polling 2008

I worked the polls again this past election. I was really leaning towards no when the Registrar called me to see if I was available, but they had a training class that was convenient (apart from being held in a church that had Yes on H8 signs all over), and a spot at my local (walkable) precinct was available.

Training class was ok, there were far fewer dumb questions than usual, the ballot-counting math still baffled people though. I wonder if basic math skills are no longer taught in school. It's probably just not funded anymore, there are more important things to spend our money on these days (like constitutionally mandated discrimination).

I was relieved when the precinct officer called me to set up a set up time. She asked many good questions - had I worked an election before, etc. She then went on about how she would be relieved to have competent (my word, not hers) people working with her.

Turns out, I was wrong. We, the underlings, wouldn't be working with her, we'd be working for her. She arrived late on election day (voters arrived at the precinct before her!), and frequently went home for some random thing or other - glasses, food, check results.

Setup sucked, as usual. You meet people for the first time, most of them are lazy bastards and just sit around watching other people work. And, of course, there are the issues with different interpretations of the rules - no, we can't set up the ballots tonight, the machine stays sealed in the bag til morning, etc. But we're a team, we work through them. Or we just ignore the other people and do what we know is right (arrogant, I know).

The day wasn't so bad. Apart from the uber-conservative, homophobic precinct officer, most of the other poll workers were good; there were even a few of high school/college students - they were all so cute. I so wanted to put them all at one table, the "kids" table :) Sadly, they all left by mid-afternoon.

One guy was particularly annoying. He kept asking voters if they "knew about the arrow voting system" - sheesh, you connect the tail of the arrow to the head, it's not a system. And, by the way, STOP using one of the candidate names in your example; that's biasing the voters (the wrong way :).

He also kept telling little kids to "make sure your parents don't screw up their ballots" - I can just see where that would go - "mommy, you're not going to screw things up, are you?" "no, of course not dear, mommies don't screw things up, they vote for other people to do their screwing up." I have to wonder if he wasn't some sort of perv.

Cleanup would have gone better were it not for two things - the lack of math skills I mentioned earlier (counting ballots "should" be easy, but we go out of our way to make it difficult for some reason), and more importantly, when we found out that McCain conceded (thanks iPhone for making that possible) the precinct officer fell apart and just started babbling about random meaningless things, predicting the end of the world, calling people ignorant liberals, etc. Funny how hard it is to accomplish anything when the person who ultimately has to sign off on things is in a vegetative state.

Oh well. I'm afraid you're going to have to go at it without me next election. I can't deal with the crazy lady..