Ballots Falling With A Sound Like Leaves

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I had a long day the fifth of November. A long day, a fun day, a thrilling day. When I got out of the house with ballot box and ballots kit Tuesday morning, Jupiter was still to be seen in the southern sky. I dropped X-Lydia off at the bus station and scooted to the polling station, Oxnard Fire Department, Station #6. Two other election boards (a polling inspector and a couple-three polling clerks) were mostly already set up as of six-fifteen in the morning. We flurried around and were just putting the last bits of polling-booth stuff on our table when we made the mandated announcement: “The polls are open!” There were about a dozen voters almost kicking the door down in their eagerness.

The first ballot, its half-dozen punch cards in a secrecy envelope, hit the bottom of my ballot box with a plasticky thud a few minutes later. My own absentee ballot (I wasn’t working in my own voting precinct) was about the second one into the box. I spent the next few hours keeping the ballot box for our election board’s table under my eye and its padlock key in my shirt pocket, getting acquainted with the other members of my board – as a first-time Balloting Inspector I was very glad of my veteran Balloting Clerks. Anything I didn’t know, they already did. We poll workers hand out ballots to the voters whose last names are in our portion of the alphabet – at our polling place it was divided into thirds – remove the ballot stubs, help voters who haven’t got the Datapunch ballot punch quite lined up exactly because it won’t punch until it is lined up, and fix things when, as did happen, one young (well, middle-aged) Hercules managed to slide every punch card into the Datapunch at once, and drive the punch head through all of the ballot cards. Welp, put that ballot in the “Spoiled Ballots” envelope, which is the official receptacle for mispunched ballots, and issue this gentleman so strong in the pursuit of American democracy a replacement ballot. I hope the Datapunch is still the same after that incident; punching completely through six ballot cards is tough.

The biggest part of an election board’s work, though, is the trickier stuff. People who changed election precincts and didn’t reregister to vote at their new address have a couple of options, the simplest of which is to go vote one last time in their old precinct. The other thing they can do is show up at their new precinct and cast a provisional ballot and simultaneously reregister to vote at their new address. California voters have to do this to have a provisional ballot count. It’s a bit more of legal hoop-jumping to go through on Election Day, but it does get your reregistration taken care of. Provisional ballots get a special pink envelope to be sealed in. Then the Elections Department processes both your vote and your reregistration, and you’re good to go for next time. (“He used to vote there, and now he’s moved to over here? Confirmed? Fine; let his voice be heard – and his new address duly entered!”)

We also received plenty of absentee ballots, which may be dropped off at any polling place, the County Headquarters, or mailed to the Elections Division of your home county. In the ballot box they went, singly and in bunches. As the ballot box filled, the ballot envelopes stopped thudding and started landing atop each other with a whispery sound like big leaves falling. “That sound is the sound of your vote counting,” I would say to voters as I dropped their ballots through the slot. “You have been – civic!” I’d say to others. Ballot boards even have a procedure for somebody who brings us an absentee ballot that they either made a mistake on and want a do-over with a regular ballot, or an absentee ballot without its envelope, sealed, and inscribed with the voter’s signature as well as that of any agent who might be turning the ballot in at a polling place for him. We had one of those, and they get their own color of ballot envelope. It’s white, and it’s called a Research Absentee Ballot. Like the Provisional, it gets processed for its veracity at the Elections Division.

Around noon, I sipped more coffee from my thermos and munched a sandwich I’d brownbagged. Business picked up around the lunch hour; after the initial before-work rush, the voters trickled in in a thin but steady stream. Nobody got bored. We updated the curbside roster of voters about once an hour – that’s the roster of voters who have actually voted this day, in this precinct. I found a few more places to put up “Polling Place, No Electioneering Beyond This Point” signs. The California radius is 100 feet. The sidewalk across the street was the place where you could electioneer to your heart’s content, if you were of a mind. Nobody was. Poll watchers were thick on the ground by the front door. Durned if we could figure out exactly what they were doing, but they stayed there a long time quietly doing it, carrying what looked like Master Voter Rosters around with them all day and into the night.

We were to keep a pen in every voting booth for the aid of write-in voting. An amazing fraction of them disappeared over the day – perhaps the voters thought they were souvenir promotional pens, and theirs to keep? No wonder write-in candidates have such a hard time winning elections.

I’m kidding.

Business was thin but steady through the afternoon until work let out and then it picked up again. No political weirdoes, just Mr. & Mrs. Middle-Class America coming in and casting ballots. About mid-afternoon,the Roving Ballot Inspector showed up to check me out and answer anything I’d been puzzling over. I asked her about the short ballot stubs that were part of the accounting process – turns out there are two distinct short ballot stubs, both of which attach to one end of the ballot card. This hadn’t been altogether clear to me, the first-timer.

There were more and more voters every hour, but there were just enough voting booths to keep the voters from having to queue up – and the voters in the booths were punching away like Santa’s elves. Making lots of chads. Elections Division workers do not like to say “chads” these days – but that’s a story for later, and I’ve already told it.

At eight p.m., we declared the polls closed. We didn’t have to do anything fancy with lines or waiting voters; the last ballot had made its leaf-fall sound about seven-fifty-five. Now it was time for the ballots to come out of the box, be counted, sorted as to regular, provisional, absentee and research absentee, and spoiled and surrendered absentee ballots be accounted for and the ballot cards put into a card box in the precinct supplies provided for that purpose and that card box with the people’s choices then taped and sealed in a large plastic envelope with a tamper-evident seal on it and the whole returned to the ballot box which I then locked and sealed in the capacity of my office. Now it was myself and a witness to bring the sealed ballot box to the receiving point for ballots, which was the same place I’d gotten the ballot box and blank ballot cards from the day before and stowed overnight in the front hall of my house. My witness was one of my board clerks. I handed the state trooper at the receiving point the ballot box and the official receipt, which was duly signed and a copy remanded to me. My custody of and responsibility for my ballot box was ended; I’d had it; they’d got it. I crumpled my receipt into my shirt pocket – the ballot box key that had resided there all day was already secured inside the locked ballot box. Drop off my board clerk at her place, then drive home and watch election returns until I couldn’t stay awake any more. Have some fun hanging out in chatrooms listening to the leftists bewail what is happening to their dubious ideas about what America is all about as left-of-center candidates fall like wheat before the scythe – and get a warm feeling about our future as a republic, for the first time in quite a while. Looks like the pendulum’s swinging in a direction I like… The phone rings. X-Lydia’s done reading the regular ballots and it’s about one in the morning when I pick her up at the County building. Home again, and we crawl under the covers.

“Well, thank God we ain’t Florida!”

That’s pretty much the watchword down in the County building’s basement where Elections Division works. I spent a couple of days down there processing absentee ballots, preparing them for easy reading by ballot card reading machines. We’re looking for properly executed write-ins with both the name and the punch done – and they have to be officially registered write-in candidates for the vote to count for – or against – anything or anyone. A few write-ins for Governor were so unimpressed by either Gray Davis the incumbent Democrat or with Bill Simon the Republican challenger, and so uninformed of any of the third-party candidates on the ballot that they wrote in names like Richard Riordan or Arnold Schwartzenegger. I found one such write-in where the voter didn’t feel up to even trying to spell “Schwartzenegger” and left yours truly with no clear indication of whether the voter’s intent was to cast his ballot for a famous strongman of Austrian birth, or a character on Nickelodeon. “Arnold,” just “Arnold.” Not even an initial.

Too bad for these folks neither of these were running for any California office.

And “none of the above” is still not an option. And frankly, I think that having that choice on a ballot would promote an electoral laziness that would not be good for our continuance as a republic. A republic – the Latin res publica, the “thing of the public,” requires that the publica actually do something about it, rather than put its hands in its collective pockets and mutter, “Not my job, man.” If you consider that every single candidate for an office is a thoroughgoing jerk and a reptile, I say it’s a better option to abolish the office in question: it’s clearly not attracting people of good character.

Some voters have a little trouble following directions. While the Elections Division absolutely won’t call them “chads” – preferring words like “doughnut holes” or even “ballot droppings” – anything, anything but the c-word, the ordinary American would still call them what they are. They are perfed in the ballot card and you punch them out with the point of a pen and the whole idea is to get the chad completely detached from the ballot card so the machine can read it, and the directions on an absentee ballot explicitly state as much, and still some people just, well, don’t get this and either mark Xes on the ballot or don’t get the chad punched all the way out. So, Elections Division has to detach the chads, by hand, with care, so as not to mess up the ballot with a double punch or rip the ballot’s edge. Damaged ballots hang up in the reading machines. Temporary poll workers like me just put these dubious ballots in envelopes sorted by ballot type, for more official officialdom to massage. And you wonder where your property tax money goes. Well, some of the time, it goes to fix oopsies and patch leaks.

By an odd little turn of fate – just casually picking up a bundle of absentee ballots from the tray of a co-worker – one of the very last absentee ballots I processed was my own. You know your own signature when you see it on the outside of a ballot envelope. Since ballot processing is an entirely public function and any John Q. Voter or Agamemnon Q. Pollwatcher can come and look at how you are doing it – through a floor-to-ceiling chainlink fence and no talking allowed, to say nothing of feeding the pollworkers peanuts – probity in handling the ballots is of utmost importance, and ballot processing is designed to facilitate it. I paused to consider if I should recuse myself from processing my own ballot. I asked the co-worker, he of the tray, what his opinion was. After thought, we figured that it would not be unethical for me to process my own ballot once it was out of the envelope, which was the only thing identifiable about the ballot.

That nanoadventure isn’t going to disturb either my sleep or my conscience.

A couple of years from now, I’m going to do this again.

[Undertoad]

Thank you for being a competent poll worker.

In PA the rule is that electioneering has to be 10 feet from the entrance to the polling place. In many places the entrance is considered to be inside the building; they figure it means the entrance to the room where the voting is happening. This allows electioneering folks to set up a gauntlet of signs and of people handing out literature. It is obnoxious and is one more thing the potential voter has to endure.

[wolf]

Originally posted by Undertoad
Thank you for being a competent poll worker.

In PA the rule is that electioneering has to be 10 feet from the entrance to the polling place. ..... This allows electioneering folks to set up a gauntlet of signs and of people handing out literature. It is obnoxious and is one more thing the potential voter has to endure.

I just stare them down and tell them that nothing they try to hand me is going to make one damn bit of difference in my opinions ... unless they are trying very hard to turn me AWAY from their candidate. That tends to shut them up.