After signing up for the job, my first surprise was the requirement of a four-hour training. Why would anyone need four hours of training to mark names off a list and point to a booth? I was soon to find out.
Turns out that helping with an election is not so simple. For one thing, the helpers set up and tear down the polling place—a complicated process involving laptops, wifi hot spot, privacy booths, signs, Voter Assistance Terminal, ballot box/tabulator, ballots, affidavits, and on and on. Secondly, they have to know what to do with all these things on Election Day. It’s quite a process, well managed by Rose Redmon and Matthew Grandone.
With the number of details to be covered there was a high potential of the training being a bore. It was not. The young man who taught, Matt, was articulate and animated. The morning passed easily as he led with demonstrations and instructions, all recorded for us in a manual of over sixty pages. The reply to one participant’s question was something like, “you’re judges. Use your good judgment.” This was when I realized the responsibility of the position.
The five judges of Precinct 37 met each other when we arrived for set up at 9:00 Monday night. We worked together through the carefully detailed instructions, one of us reading each step aloud, the others enacting. “Use the black key from the clear pouch in the second section of the red binder to unlock flap #2 of the ballot box and place in the DOWN position.” Right! (Or something like that.) We set up computers, machines, and booths. Fortunately one of us was computer savvy. After an hour we came to the page in the instruction manual which says: STOP. Everything else was to be done election day.
After a short night’s sleep, we arrived in the rain at 5 the next morning. First on the agenda was taking the judges of election oath. We then verified that we were in the right place with the correct ballots for that precinct. We finished setting up and at exactly 6:00 unlocked the front doors.
Except for an occasional ten-minute break, a steady stream of people flowed past our tables from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m. Sometimes they had to wait in line. Our team of five worked together well and enjoyed the camaraderie. After the first morning rush, my opposite-party partner and I hit our stride: find name in the data base; check the two signatures; give brief instruction while handing out the correct ballot. Over 80% of the time it was simple.
Slowdowns came when someone wasn’t in the system or had moved or changed a name. In such cases the voter might need to fill out an affidavit, or we might need to call the Election Judge Hotline. At that point most people could vote provisionally or go to the Brookens Center to correct his or her information and vote there.
