“It’s important,” she said.
She has been worrying about democracy and elections pretty much since DJT was re-elected in 2024 and started calling elections and the workers who manage them corrupt. As a history buff, she can see the signs of civic disengagement as demagogues and thugs threaten to make election workers miserable and intimidate voters.
She has been supporting candidates who share her concerns, but that wasn’t enough, I guess.
Which is how I found myself Saturday morning in Angleton being trained to work as an election clerk.
There were twelve of us at the class, eleven newbies and an election judge getting a refresher. Our instructor, Brazoria County’s elections supervisor, was a delightful and enthusiastic middle-aged woman who had that command of procedure and esoterica that the best government workers have, a confidence from years of having seen every possible ridiculous malfunction, outrageous gadfly complaint, and political hustle thrown at her, while remaining standing and delivering a free and fair election.
The job I’d applied for was election clerk, which is distinguishable from election judge in one key respect: if a problem arises as a clerk is processing a voter - checking identification, locating the proper ballot, sending the person to a machine - we send that problem to the election judge and get out of the way.
This was ironic because in my former life, I worked on some of those same election law issues from a prosecutor’s perspective, and when I applied to work as a clerk, I wrote that I could be helpful in that respect.
But my role as a clerk was much simpler than I expected. The instructor kept saying, “You only handle perfect voters,” which was intended to be reassuring, and I guess it was, at least for now. This is my apprenticeship.
I am scheduled for four nine-hour shifts during early voting, and will be working a precinct in East Pearland on voting day. There will be at least one election judge and three clerks each day, which takes some of the pressure off of what should be an interesting runoff between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton with a decent turnout.
We apparently also get paid for this, which is nice. And, by law, we cannot use a smartphone in the voting location, which is going to be a test of the depths of my phone addiction. Did I say nine hours?
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Now that the golf trip is behind me, it’s time for me to start working on my second book, which is due in September. I have been contracted to update a book on legal conflicts, which, when finished, will be sent free of charge to every prosecutor in the state of Texas.
I have a plan.
I need to check the cases cited in the original book to make sure that they are still good law. Then I need to read and index the cases that were decided after the original book was written. And then I need to add any new content or theories about conflicts to the original book.
Ever the procrastinator, I have a finely tuned inner alarm clock that tells me when I am approaching the point of not enough time to get it done. That clock is beginning to beep at me.
So that is something I will be doing this week. Writing is harder work than you think.
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I am fighting a change of seasons cold where a cough has settled into my lungs. Nothing terrible, mostly annoying.
These minor maladies are usually my excuse to indulge myself with something soothing to eat. Unfortunately, the only ice cream in the house was a Drumstick that had melted and then refrozen in our garage refrigerator. It looked sad and deflated in its plastic wrapper, and I am kind of proud to say that, even though it was technically food and technically sweet and absolutely the only ice cream in the house, I decided to just throw it away. Good for me.
I watched a little SNL and then went to bed.
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Today: rest and recovery before getting back into my exercise routine again. Also a Rockets game tonight!
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