View from the Front Line at the Polls

This is the 3rd time I have served as an election judge in Chicago.  The first time, in 2004, I applied for the position because it looked like an easy way to make a hundred bucks for a day's work.  Funny thing is, I got hooked.  All those little old ladies and little old men who sit at the polling place table and give the voter the ballot?  Well, suddenly I was one of them (albeit about 30 years younger than all the rest of them.)  And you know what?  What they do matters.

As someone who has always just breezed in and collected my ballot and voted, I was totally unaware of the various questions that can arise about letting someone vote.  But people do come in to the polling place who don't have a signature page in the 'big book' and it then becomes the judges' decision whether to let them vote or not.  If they've moved, we have to decide which polling place they should vote in.  (And if it's another one, we have to hope the place we send them to will interprete the instruction book the same way and not send them back--that's happened.)  If they are a new voter who registered by mail we are supposed to get two IDs with their address.  If they only have one, what do we do?  (Have them sign an affadavit that they really live there and we sign that we believe them.)

And then there's the actual voting--not just explaining the ballot and the touch screen (which is interesting in and of itself) but watching the husband and wife or senior and adult child who come in together and 'help' each other.  The instruction book says if anyone helps another person we are supposed to have the helpee sign an affadavit that this was okay--but I am positive I am not the only election judge who looked the other way as the pair in question handled the voting as they have obviously done unquestioned for many years.  I didn't have the nerve to interfere.  Which I guess means I didn't uphold the exact requirements of the law.  

It is actually an amazing responsibility, to have the power to allow or prevent another citizen from exercising their right to vote, and I find that it means something to me, to the point where I see myself doing this for a long time (until I am one of the 'little old ladies'?)  And I wish there was a way to get other people interested.  The senior citizens who do the job bring varying degrees of willingness to try new things, and the computerized voting has thrown some of them for a loop.  I feel the most for the ones who are really trying to get it but just aren't tech-savvy at all, like the group who was stationed in the upstairs of the polling place I was at.  (We have two precincts voting in the same building, one up and one down.)  They were really trying, and unfortunately they got 2 pieces of bum equipment.  

Then there are the ones who don't want anything to do with the 21st century, and they do the same job they have always done.  Unfortunately if that job has changed, one of the other judges has to get them to do it the 'new' way.  Although, if done right, they can become tenacious at the job they do.  (Reading the paper on Wednesday I had to laugh.  One of the problems cited was the disappearance of the special pens used to mark the paper ballots.  We had one of the inflexible veterans handing out the ballots and pens, and she was ferocious about getting the pens back.  We didn't lose one.)

I guess what hits me the most is that running the polling place is a human endeavor, and like anything that involves people, the results will not be uniform, but I'd say, at least in the place I worked, that we worked with genuine effort to do it right.  And it makes me proud to live in a place where people have the last word.