Notes from a Poll Worker: Training and Procedure Edition
Last week, I was a poll worker in the NYC Primary Election. I did it for two reasons: one, because it paid $200 (plus a $100 bonus for attending the training); two, because democracy is a giant bureaucracy with poll workers as its face and I wanted to see the view from the ground.
The training itself was 4 hours with an older white guy who was clearly impeccably dressed in the 70s and had stuck with what worked. He had a PowerPoint and very forcibly emphasized the points that were going to be on the test. We got to see a ballot scanner and a voting booth (cool), talked about what to do if the scanner jams, and spent a lot of time on the BMD (the ballot marking device for people who need physical accommodations to vote.) The test was thorough, but it was open book, and there were a lot of friendly helpers around to assist us when we had questions or were unsure. When I sayĀ āassist,ā I mean, for the record, tell us the correct answer.
Pollworking in NYC is a 17 hour day: 5am (an hour before polls open) to 10pm (an hour after they close.) When we arrived at 5 we entered into a 1 hour sprint to set up the voting stations, the layout of which is specified by diagrams of justice. Unwrap the ballots! Set up the ED Identification Sign! Prop up the Election Information Holder! There was no briefing ahead of time about what was happening, issues we might be facing, how to handle expected questions. It was a race against the clock. My first voter showed up at basically 6:00:01am, because of courseĀ there is always someone like that at the party.
Hereās how it worked. Someone comes in to vote. We look them up by name, which is sometimes easy and sometimes (multiple last names or someone who uses both an English name and a name in another language) itās a mess since there is no rhyme or reason to how that works except for the thinking of the data entry clerk who entered your name. Democracy, you remember, is enacted by people. 90% of the time, we have you, you sign, theoretically I check your signature but I donāt really check your signature that hard, I give you your ballots, and away you go.Ā
Sometimes thereās a mistake - these ballots can be confusing - and so we mark your first ballot void and give you a new one. The woman I was poll working with had incredibly shaky hands. She ripped a lot of ballots and so we had to void those and hand out new ones (no shade; she was hilarious, old, and had a lot of stories about how she liked to party.) Pretty straightforward.
But if anything is not right in the voter registration book, we can hand you an affidavit ballot. Thatās it. Not there despite thinking youāre registered? Affidavit ballot. Think your party is wrong? Affidavit ballot. Not in the books at all? Affidavit ballot. You can also go to the court in your borough and get a court order to vote, but from where we were there was no way in hell anyone was ever going to go down to the court, wait on line to see a judge, come back, and then vote. So you can fill out an affidavit ballot, in which you give a reason why you think you should be able to vote and it goes into the envelope for affidavit ballots. No one ever explained this form to me so I hope I did it right. At my table, we handed out something like 170 ballots and had another 30 affidavits in the end. The guy running my voting site said temps count them. Of course they do. Itās America!
BUT HERE IS THE THING: THERE ARE A MILLION MORE PARTS TO IT THAN THAT. If someone is marked SHOW ID in the polls, I need to see ID, check the correct box on the registration book, put the right number ID code on the right line (where is this code list? No one mentioned this at first), and initial. If someone votes by affidavit, I log that too. If someoneās signature doesnāt match - if they sign āSandra Martinezā but their signature is in the book as āS Martinezā - we are supposed to challenge them, meaning they have to sign an extra oath saying they are who they say they are. This didnāt happen. There are tons of tiny details and they donāt really cover it in pollworking class and they certainly donāt remind you as youāre doing the work. You are supervised by a few people who know more, and they clearly do know more but in the way where there is a lot ofĀ āoh, that doesnāt really matterā andĀ ādonāt sweat it, you can just do it at the end.ā I at least caught the part in the manual where it said to log affidavit ballots, so I caught up around noon instead of being stuck writing them all in at the end.Ā
The nominal point of this system is that it is detailed in order to ensure that everyone has the same experience, and in the name of that the whole system and process is very carefully laid out. Of course those narrow prescriptions donāt cover everything and failure is inevitable. Voting booths should be 5 feet apart, but the whole space we had was only probably 10x50 at most so that was physically impossible. People arenāt supposed to go into voting booths together but of course I am not going to tell a 85 year old grandma that the younger person she arrived with canāt go in with her because of Her Right To Democracy, even though for all I know that person will vote for her. There are an impossible number of rules, and these technical failures are where you put party lawyers with thousands of hours of experience and incentive to win against pollworkers with 4 hours of training and incentive to be nice to people.
And we havenāt even gotten into how we countĀ the votes as pollworkers. Stay tunedā¦
