Serving as a Poll Worker
12 Nov 2024
On Tuesday, November 5th, I served as a poll worker in Westchester County for the United States general election. It was a really long day, and it wasn’t easy, but it was a rewarding experience.
My day started at 4:30am. I woke up, showered, and then walked to the Mamaroneck Senior Center, the polling place where I was serving. Upon arrival, I met a few other poll workers and we started following the procedures for setting up the site: opening polling machines, posting signs, setting up booths, etc.
Our first voter arrived at 5:50am, 10 minutes before the polls officially opened. They had to wait until 6:00am to obtain their ballot. From then on, it was a steady stream of 1-2 voters every 5 minutes until we closed the polls fifteen hours later, at 9:00pm. The same seven people worked the entire shift, though we took short breaks throughout the day. It went faster than I thought it would.
Each person at the site had a role: someone to greet, someone to check voter registration, someone to distribute ballots, someone to assist with the voting machine if necessary, etc. We rotated responsibilities throughout the day, but I spent most of my time distributing ballots and giving verbal instructions to voters: “This ballot has two sides. Make sure to read all instructions carefully, fill in the ovals completely, and make sure to only fill in one bubble for the candidate you’re voting for.”
At the end of the day, we printed out “receipts” from the voting machines, packed everything up, and called in the results the board of elections.
The Good
It was really cool to see people from all walks of life participate in our democracy
- A woman brought two of her daughters to vote for the first time
- A middle-aged man walked in with his elderly mother, arm-in-arm
- Two men coincidentally arrived at the same time as their motorcycle-riding father
- There was a couple that resembled the rich parents from Gilmore Girls
- There were police officers, construction workers, teachers, and more
The people that I worked with were fantastic
- They were helpful, knowledgeable, and treated everyone with respect
- They made it their mission to ensure everyone who could vote, did
- They were impartial (obviously)
- They navigated some complicated situations with affidavit ballots
The voting process and machines were very secure
- Machines were not connected to the internet
- All bags and latches were sealed and labeled
- There were three types of records: printed receipts, memory cards, and paper ballots
- There was an audit log for all affidavit ballots
- There was a tally for all non-standard ballots
The Bad
I felt underprepared
- I had to learn how to handle change-of-address and misspelled names.
- I never quite felt comfortable walking someone through the affidavit ballot process.
- The day-of instructions for how to handle double-voting (accidentally filling in two bubbles for the same candidate) didn’t match the training videos; we decided to be cautious and issue new ballots every time.
Logistics weren’t perfect
- We didn’t have a Spanish translator, and some voters only spoke Spanish. Luckily, one of my coworkers knew enough Spanish to help them.
- The iPad for checking voter registration (narrow search) and the iPad for checking polling locations (broad search) gave different results for the same person. This made the latter unusable.
- Many people received letters telling them to go to the wrong polling location. We think that the polling location was changed at the last minute and voters were never notified.
- A voter asked for water, but we didn’t have any to give them.
The Ugly
Some voters were antagonistic
- Someone tried to enter the polling location wearing a shirt endorsing Trump. When I asked him to zip up his jacket, he gave me a hard time: “Why? Where are my freedoms?” I didn’t dignify his questions with a response.
- Someone complained about voter suppression when his pen ran out of ink. The fix? We gave him a new pen. (It’s not a conspiracy, buddy.)
- People got upset that we didn’t check their ID. “What if someone else tried to vote under my name? What if someone is lying about who they are?”
One poll worker was tactless
- While people were voting, he listened to TikTok out loud and announced results from other states
- He took people’s ballots to feed them into the voting machine (we were supposed to let the voters do it themselves)
- He constantly scolded people for filling out the ballots incorrectly
- He talked poorly about his wife and about his real estate clients
- Interestingly, he seemed to know many people in the town and he was somewhat charming
Conclusion
I have a mixture of feelings from this experience. I feel both more patriotic and less so. I feel both hopeful and hopeless. There are good people in the world, but society is captivated by antagonists. (Here’s a great game by Nicky Case that illustrates this point: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb)
Elected officials are supposed to represent the will of the electorate. But when people are proudly declaring their vote for, “dictator on day one,” it really makes you wonder if they deserve to participate in the democratic process.
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.
–Theodore Roosevelt