Poll Dancing

In 2008, I did voter protection for the Obama campaign. This involved going to a polling place and simply observing. My role was clear--don't interfere with anything, but have some emergency numbers on hand to report any problems. This was in the wake of the notorious problems in 2004 in Cuyahoga County in particular: plenty of voting machines in white suburban districts and far too few in populous (and largely African-American) Cleveland, problems with voting machines, and on and on. My experience, at a fairly sleepy suburban polling place, was blessedly dull in 2008. A few poll workers had some misunderstandings about who had to vote a provisional ballot, which resulted in a few people at the beginning of the day voting provisionally who should have been permitted to vote a regular ballot, but this was cleared up pretty quickly. There was a pretty big crush of voters when the polls first opened, but after about 8 a.m. it was dead the rest of the day, in a very high turnout election. The reason? Newly-minted early voting. For the first time, people could vote early in person at the Board of Elections or could vote by mail without having to ask for an absentee ballot and provide a reason why they needed one. So by the time election day rolled around, more than a third of the registered voters at that precinct had already voted. This came pretty close to reducing the clog of voters by half at the polls.

Following that experience, I was solicited by the county party to be a poll worker on election day, working for the Board of Elections as a partisan appointee. Ohio requires partisan appointees from each major party at every precinct to work along with the regular poll workers. So, I thought OK, and signed up. The whole experience was, sadly, very awful. I was assigned this time to a precinct in the City of Cleveland proper, not a suburb. By virtue of the process by which I was appointed, I was given the position of Presiding Judge--head poll worker of my particular ward (there were 6 wards at my precinct). Each ward had a presiding judge and several judges, and the head honcho for the entire precinct was the Polling Location Coordinator. So at least I wasn't overboss, but candidly Presiding Judge is no position for someone who's never worked at the polls. I didn't really know what I was doing well enough for that position, a problem that was exacerbated by the fact that my ward was definitely the busiest and had the highest vote count at the end of the night of all the wards there. We'd have all been better off had I either not been made a Presiding Judge, or if I'd at least been assigned to a sleepier ward. No major disasters but several snafus, most of which of course got pinned on me whether they were my fault or not (and some were).

And we had to arrive at 5:30 that morning and stay until all was done. So we'd all been there for 14 hours once the polls closed, and then things got bad. We were exhausted, people were grumbling and some were actually screaming at each other, and I couldn't seem to improve things. We had a discrepancy in some numbers that took a while to resolve--we were finally able to account for everything but the screaming didn't help. By the end of the night I was near frazzled tears. I'd been out of bed since 4:30 in the morning, I took no lunch break (just wolfed down a cold piece of disgusting Popeye's chicken at my table), hadn't had enough water and was badly dehydrated, and a few things had gone wrong at the polls and now my numbers weren't adding up. So I was exhausted, fried, and frustrated. Don't even get me started on the woman at my ward who spent the day complaining about everybody, complaining that the food was giving her gas, and loudly belching non-stop. The most positive contribution she made was at the end of the night remembering someone who'd left the polling area with her ballot without filling it out (something of which I was unaware when it happened), thus accounting for the missing ballot on which we'd expended massive emotional energy. As I told my husband when I got home, it was the worst day I'd had in years that didn't involve a loss at trial.

But, how did things go for the voters during the day? On the whole, OK I suppose. Wait times were not insane--it was a steady stream more or less throughout the day. But there were times when we were backed up. There was one woman at our ward (and someone else at another) who messed up her ballot three times. In Ohio, if you mess up your ballot in some way and it gets caught before the machine accepts it, you can give your ballot back to the poll worker and have a do-over, but we're limited to three ballots. If you mess up three times, that's it. You can't vote. So I felt horrible for those people. And there were other people who weren't prepared--didn't bring ID, had changed their names or precincts without updating their info with the Board of Elections, things of that nature, who had to vote a provisional ballot. And they got mad in some cases. Occasionally the machine jammed up. Our Polling Location Coordinator left on his lunch break and was gone well over two hours. But on the whole, it was not a nightmare, or at least it didn't seem to be. But it did not feel like a smoothly humming machine, either.

But the upshot is that any lingering sentimentality I have for going to the polls and voting is permanently dead. I know that you get to have your "I voted sticker" when you go to the polls, but in my opinion, the benefits of voting early far outweigh that. The more people who vote early--and thus, the fewer people at the polls--the better things go. Small snafus at the polling place become larger when it's crowded. Voting by mail is a pleasant process, too--you can fill out your ballot on your own time, with a glass of wine, in front of the computer to research ballot issues and candidates. And if you're a partisan player, whether Republican or Democrat, trust me when I say that YOUR PARTY WANTS YOU TO VOTE EARLY if it's an option for you. The more votes they have in the bank beforehand, the better they can use their resources going up to and on Election Day.

So that was my experience. I won't repeat it. I'll do GOTV on election day, or voter protection, but not this. This was awful. And please, next election, if you can vote early, do it.