My Experience as a Pollworker Part II

Click here for Part I.

. . . so where was I, oh yes, election day. First, there are some clean up items from Monday night, election eve.

After I pulled double duty as a Polling Location Coordinator (PLC) first at my polling location and then at Pearlbrook, I finally made it home at about 9:45 p.m. I was trying to settle in to get some rest (difficult because I was pensive about what lay ahead on election day given the inauspicious beginning at the Monday organizational meeting) when my cell phone rang at about 9:50 pm. It was the Board of Elections (BOE) calling.

An nice young women (whose name I forget) was calling to thank me for stepping up to the plate (her words) to be the Polling Location Coordinator and to let me know that I was being "officially promoted" to that position. I accepted, with the caveat that I would not be able to be the PLC for two polling locations (though I like to think of myself as superhuman, sadly, I am not) as that would be humanly impossible. I offered to show up at the Pearlbrook location in the morning to do the final steps of setting up the electronic voting machine for the visually impaired, but that was it. She agreed and thanked me.

I awoke at 4:15 am on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 having had about 5 hours or so of fitful sleep. I showered, shaved and arrived at my regular assigned polling location at about 4:55 am. The church custodian arrived just about time at 5:05 am and opened the facility. I went quickly about my duties and then excused myself to perform the same function at the Pearlbrook location up the street.

Completing the duplicate task at Pearlbrook, I returned to my regular assigned location to get ready to open the polls at 6:30 am.

At 6:20 am, I noticed that we had folks in line to vote already. I'm not sure how long they'd been there, but I assume they didn't all arrive simultaneously and there were about six people in line by then. This was going to be a busy, busy day.

Under the then current regimen of voting in Cuyahoga county (see cleveland.com article that tells us we'll be changing things again for the November election here); each precinct in a polling location was to have four (4) judges. Judge #1 and #2 were supposed to each have one of the alphabetical poll books (one is A-M, the other N-Z) where people sign to vote. Of course, these folks have to check i.d. now, too. Judge #3 was supposed to hand the correct ballot (e.g. Democratic, Republican, or Issues Only) to the voter after they had passed the scrutiny of Judge 1 or 2. Judge #3 also was supposed to read to each voter from a script. The voter then proceeded to a "privacy booth" where they marked their ballots and then returned them to the precinct specific ballot box.

Judge #4 from each precinct was supposed to sit at the "voter assistance table" and handle "problem voters"; folks who needed to vote provisionally.

This system was a great plan, provided, however, that all assigned workers showed up, and stayed the whole day.

My precinct was already short-handed one judge, me, because I was now acting as the PLC. Our illustrious Presiding Judge decided at about 8:30 a.m., that she had a "family emergency" to attend to and left. (We later learned that her daughter had missed the bus back to the University of Toledo, and she had to driver her there.) This semi-literate individual called the BOE for permission to leave, stating to them that her precinct was fully staffed (which it wasn't) and that everything was under control. Of course, she never consulted with anyone else on her "team" about this, and she just left. She returned about 1:30 that afternoon. In the meantime, we noticed that she (acting as Judge #3) had started with the wrong package of Democrat ballots (she started with number 101 instead of 1, which would screw our count up at the end of the night).

In addition, at one point someone overheard her asking a voter to vote for the Cleveland Library levy, which another judge admonished her about. I eventually called the BOE and explained to them that this person was a Total Disaster and had her dispatched.

Now, we were really shorthanded and our polling location was really busy. Instead of having 4 people for my originally assigned precinct, we only had three. So, no Judge #4 for the voter assistance table. I did that job, plus the PLC job, which was to great every voter who entered the polling location and direct them to the correct precinct. Precinct R was short-handed because their student worker never showed, so they had no one at the voter assistance table. Precinct Q's presiding judge spent much time at the voter assistance table dealing with the numerous provisional voters; but she was also the most experienced person at the polling location, so she kept getting called away to trouble shoot other issues in her precinct as well as the others.

Among the problems we encountered that day:

People putting their ballots into the wrong ballot box. Ballots had to be returned to the correct precinct ballot box, but voters could vote in any privacy booth. At least two people (that I know of) put their ballot in the wrong box. We were able to correct this at the end of the night when we opened the boxes to count the ballots, we made sure they got to the correct box. This took A LOT of additional time, however.

People making mistakes on their ballots. Many, many, many people requested their second and sometimes third ballot because they made errors. This would not have been so bad, except that when a replacement ballot was requested the #3 Judge had to record information regarding each of those instances in three different places. As short-handed and busy as we were, it really was difficult and frustrating to deal with erred ballots.

Too many provisional voters. So many people voted in this election that haven't voted in so long, that there were A LOT of provisional voters. Completing the paperwork (correctly) for the provisional ballots is very time consuming and at least twice during the day we had 3 -4 people waiting for someone to help them with a provisional ballot.

Too many last minute changes to procedures. There were so many last minute changes and mid-day changes to procedures that only added to the chaos of an already busy election day. It was extremely frustrating.

In summation, the Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, really has to put herself in the place of front line poll workers when she is issuing these "directives" and changes. I would like to see a law enacted that voting procedures must be set in stone at least 90 days in advance of the election. Any changes passed later than that cannot take effect until the next election.

Many of the problems we had could have been (would have been) avoided by the electronic voting machines.

CEP