[littlemissattitude]

Oh, man. I'm glad I asked for luck for yesterday. If it wasn't for all of you and your good wishes, I don't know if I would have gotten through it. It was insane.

Actually, most of the voters were perfectly nice and much more patient than I thought they would be. There were a few though....sheesh. I even got cornered by one in the parking lot at McDonald's on my lunch break. And then there were the people I was working with. I don't think they paid much attention in the training session.

I knew it would be a rough day when some guy came by at 6:15 a.m., wanting to vote. When we explained to him that the polls didn't open till seven, he asked if we couldnt' let him go ahead and vote and then record it at seven. *Sigh* Then, people started lining up at about 6:30. Good thing we were ready to go at 7; otherwise there might have been a riot. Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but we would have had some very unhappy voters on our hands.

The lines lasted all day. During the afternoon there were a couple of instances when there wasn't anyone waiting in line for maybe five minutes or so, but other than that collective ten minutes or so, there was a line all day long. About an hour before the polls closed the line was all the way down the walkway and into the parking lot; I had to go out and wrangle voters to get them to curve the line along the sidewalk instead of blocking traffic in the lot. I could just see the headlines: "POLLING PLACE PARKING LOT DISASTER: VOTERS MOWN DOWN BY CAR". No way we needed that.

I've worked at polling places for close to twenty years, off and on, and I've never seen anything even remotely like the turnout we had yesterday. Way over six hundred voters in a precinct where I've never seen as many as three hundred vote before. Still, there were so many registered voters in the precinct - over 1300 - that our actual percentage was lower than predicted. Then again, that voter total doesn't count all the people (close to 100) who returned voted absentee ballots to the precinct instead of mailing them, nor all the absentee voters who voted but mailed their ballots in.

For the most part, the voters were in good humor. We did have one elderly gentleman who came in and wanted an absentee ballot. We explained to him that the ballot we had was exactly the same as the absentee ballot, but he insisted that he wanted an absentee ballot and none other, and went away muttering something about hiring a lawyer. I'm not quite sure what that was all about. There was, however, a big problem with people who were supposed to get absentee ballots in the mail not receiving them, and folks who did not ask for an absentee ballot and in fact did not receive one being marked on the voter roster has having received one. That caused us to have to issue a number of provisional ballots much higher than should have been necessary. This just made counting things at the end of the day more complicated. But more about that later.

I mentioned the woman who cornered me during my lunch break. She had complained while she was voting that it was too loud in the polling place. We tried to explain to her that we can't require people to be silent while they are there, but she wasn't buying it. So, when I got my break, I innocently went off to McDonalds to get some lunch to take back home to my mom (and some for myself, but I ended up not having time to eat much of it). All went well until I was in the parking lot, walking back to my car. Then, here was this woman demanding that I hear her out. Which was fine, I suppose. She wanted her complaint heard. But when she had repeated everything three or four times, I finally had to tell her that I only had a limited amount of time and that I had to go.

One of the woman's complaints had to do with someone talking on a cell phone in the next voting booth, and sounding like they were taking direction from someone on the other end of the phone who was telling him or her how to vote. I tried to tell her that we can't take people's phones away or tell them they can't use them. What I was thinking was, Well, if someone is stupid enough to let someone else tell them how to vote, that's not anything we can prevent. I don't know how many people carry voting guides from one organization or another into the booth with them and then follow the recommendations on the guide for every office and issue. To me, that's the same thing only without the phone. In the end, I assured the woman that I would bring the subject up with our area coordinator. And I did, and she said just what I had told the woman - there wasn't anything we could do about it legally.

By the end of the evening I got restless. Since they had sent us an extra worker, I started working the line outside the door. I asked people if they had any questions about whether they were at the right polling place, if they were only wanting to drop off a voted absentee ballot (in which case they didn't have to stand in line), and generally trying to keep people in a patient mood. By that point the wait was about half an hour, so I was worried that people would get frustrated, leave, and then grumble later that they didn't get to vote. A couple of people did leave after I announced that the polls were closed at 8 p.m. and put myself at the end of the line. There were about twenty people still in line at eight, and it took something like twenty minutes until we got them all in and out and were able to start the counting process.

Ah, yes. Counting. We don't actually tabulate the votes. The normal ballot is tabulated by the accu-vote machine, so we get a print-out that tells us how many people voted, how many votes each candidate got and how many yes and no votes were cast for each issue. But we also have ballots that would not scan for some reason. And all those pesky provisional ballots. We don't count the votes on any of those, either. But we do have to count how many there are of each kind, as well as how many spoiled and cancelled ballots there are and how many voted absentee ballots were returned to the precinct. Also, because someone's count on the tally sheet was off, we (I, actually, because no one else ever wants to count them) had to count all the signatures in the roster - the active voter roster, the inactive voter roster, and the list of voters added to the roster (provisional voters). It's enough to make a person crosseyed, especially when they've already been awake for fifteen hours and going non-stop the whole time.

So, I counted the signatures. I counted by page and then added up the totals of the pages. However, when I tried to add them using my poor little calculator, someone would interrupt me every time I got about halfway through the roster. After three times, I just got out a pencil and paper and added them the old fashioned way. Which was fine; it didn't take me nearly as long as it did the rest of them to get the rest of the place cleaned up. But then I started to fill out the precinct ballot statement - the grand accounting of the votes, the voted ballots, and the unused ballots. It's the way they make sure that there aren't more voted ballots than signatures, or more voted ballots than ballots provided to the precinct, or more signatures than voted ballots (which would mean that some ballots grew legs and left the building...not a good thing). It's a nervous time, because if the tally is too far off, there will be Questions Asked. Well, we came out off by one ballot - and I think I know why the tally was off. But one ballot off is not unusual and, as far as I've ever known, nothing anyone worries about. I've worked in precincts where the final accounting was off by as much as fifteen or twenty and nothing was ever made of it, at least as far as I know. Usually the errors are of a mathematical variety and caught when the elections department does their canvass - count - of the votes in each precinct.

The problems last night came when I had to ask the other workers for counts from different boxes and envelopes. One very important document was lost for about fifteen minutes, without which I would not have been able to completel the precinct ballot statement. Then, after it was found, someone gave me the wrong figure for something. I knew it was the wrong figure, but was told that, no I was wrong and the figure was correct. Fortunately, when we were finishing up some other counting, we discovered the correct figure. Well, I discovered the correct figure when completing some other paperwork, but by that time I didn't press the fact that I had been right all along. They would have just told me I was wrong again.

We got out of the place by 9:30 p.m., only half an hour longer than we were supposed to be there, but considering that we didn't get to start the closing procedures until twenty minutes after eight, that's not bad. Today, I'm just tired, and my legs ache because I was on them pretty much all day. There were stretches when I got to sit for an hour or two at a time, but I spent a lot of time at the ballot box, up and down out of the chair. And then there was that time keeping people happy and their questions answered outside just before closing time.

And, as you probably would have guessed from things I've posted here before, I'm not happy about how the big race came out. Not happy at all. But that's not what this thread is about. And, balancing things out at least a little bit, in my county the extension of the Library Tax (enabling branches to stay open longer hours and buy more books) passed, as did the Zoo Tax, which will enable the zoo in Fresno to make improvements and keep its accreditation - and it's big animals. Which is a good thing. And, best of all, NO MORE STUPID CAMPAIGN ADS ON TV. And that's something to celebrate.