Hey Scott, please plan to arrive no later than 7:45 tomorrow morning. Looking forward to working with you.
My shift was from 8 to 5, but this made some sense because voting started at 8, and the judge would want everything ready to go when the doors opened on Monday morning.
Still, this was kind of annoying because I don’t do anything before 8:00. When I worked, I was rarely in the office before 9:00, and in retirement, I am doing puzzles in bed most mornings from 7:30 to 8:30.
(I don’t really sleep in for two reasons: (1) I have old man bladder issues these days which means I gotta pee; and (2) my dogs want love and attention and will lick my face until I wake up. Also, I can’t really go back to sleep once I’m up without feeling hungover when I wake up again an hour or two later.
Those two extra hours are super REM sleep with my brain in overdrive putting me in extremely weird and uncomfortable dream scenarios, probably my brain’s passive-aggressive way to get me back into real world action. I always like to think about why evolution leads to certain outcomes, and here the answer is pretty evident: our forebears who went back to sleep did not do as well compared to the people hunting and gathering for the clan in the morning and were probably held in contempt by the females, ensuring that they did not pass their genes on. My dad and I both liked early morning runs, so maybe I’m from the hunter-gatherer side of the ancestral tree (less hunter, more gatherer, to be honest, but still a productive person).)
So on Sunday night, I was in bed early and slept fitfully. When the alarm went off, I hit the snooze a few times and only left myself about twenty minutes to get ready for the day. Quick shower, teeth cleaning, threw on some professional-ish clothes and out the door, arriving at 7:47, late.
I went into the polling place and met the judge, who could not have been nicer. The machines were already set up (the judge had set the room up over the weekend), and everyone was ready to go.
I was the only rookie. In addition to the judge, there was an associate judge, and three other clerks.
There were five stations: a check-in desk with three iPads running a proprietary scanning system for drivers licenses to verify the identity of the voters; a station where voters would bring their verification printout to obtain a unique code to access the voting booths; a station with equipment to bring voting machinery outside for drive-by voting for people with disabilities; and the ballot box itself where the paper ballot is scanned and securely stored.
I started at the identification verification station. There, I would put a DL in a designated slot on the iPad stand where it would be scanned and linked to the county’s election roll database and pull up the voter’s information. I would then ask the voter if he or she still resided at the address in the county records, and flip the iPad toward the voter for a signature. Then I’d flip it back to me, initial the interaction, and print out the receipt of verification. I’d then send the voter to the voter booth station.
I worked with a sweet older lady and we talked about retired life. I tried really hard not to puff myself up as some kind of election law savant. I’d read the room and the people there were all non-lawyers and humble, not the kind of folks who would be impressed by that kind of thing, and I just wanted to fit in.
After a couple of hours of that job, I moved to the ballot box. I was there mainly to help people feed their ballots into the scanner and make sure they did not leave with their ballot. Apparently, what a voter does in the booth is not recorded at all - it is just a place where the voter’s choices are printed onto the ballot. The vote itself is not recorded until the ballot goes into the box.
And all hell breaks loose if the voter leaves with his or her paper ballot. The numbers don’t add up and it gives the gadflies some reason to question the integrity of the vote. Everyone in the system emphasized that everything in the room was designed to prevent and rebut any such speculations.
At 12:30, I got a lunch break and had a nice chicken sandwich at a nearby barbecue. It was then that I could get back on my phone and see what I’d missed all morning, which was basically nothing. Nothing at all.
I’d spent the morning reading April 1865, the book from my Library Project. It was really good, albeit a little overwritten, giving me a flavor of the battles leading up to the conclusion of the Civil War. More to come on that when I finish.
When I got back, it was time for me to work the station handing out access codes and ballot paper to the voters before they went into the voting booths to make their choices. I had a little orange flag to catch the voters’ attention after they left the verification station. The voters were always amused by my waving with the little flag. I’d ask them to tell me their name to make sure it matched the slip they handed me, and then I’d print out their unique access code and hand them a unique blank sheet of shiny photo paper to feed into the voting machine.
That’s where I remained until 5:00. This was not deep thinking, just a lot of making sure that proper procedures were being followed. Our election judge did not have many controversies to resolve, except for a voter whose recently annexed neighborhood had not been updated to vote in the Pearland elections. A quick call to Angleton resolved that issue and the voter returned in the afternoon with access to the Pearland ballot.
Everyone was nice and seemed to like me. I have three more shifts with these folks, and if turnout remains what it was on Monday (134 voters), I will get to know them much better.
The jury is still out on whether this is something I want to do in the long run. It’s not that intellectually stimulating, although I did have time to read my book. We will see.
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Today, a walk and some exercise. Then some legal work in the afternoon. Also considering making plans to visit Chicago in May for my wife’s birthday. She certainly deserves a nice trip.
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