The Polls
As I mentioned in a blog a few posts ago, I spent a month working for the Census. My intention at the time was to support my country. After a month of Census work I decided I needed to support myself instead and I left the position. On November 3rd, I returned to my civic self and spent a long day working the polls for the 2020 National Election.
Honestly, my work started earlier - about two weeks earlier when I started training for Election Day. Then the afternoon before Election Day I headed to the polling place I was set to work at. As I drove to the polling place I listened to the news. Listen is a passive word. I clung to the news. After months of uncertainty I wanted a clue of who would win the election. In my heart I knew that it really didn’t matter what they said on the news - I would find out soon enough who would win (ha! Little did I know then how long that would take). But I still listened to the news story with hopes that I would get some sense of relief from the information the newscaster would provide. Another part of me was whispering in my head to not get hopeful - remember what happened in 2016. Still I listened to the reasoning the newscaster gave, hoping to give my heart some semblance of peacefulness.
When I arrived at the polling place we started setting up the voting machines. The leader of our polling group had us take apart the luggage that comes to a polling place and line up the polling stations around the room. Then she proceeded to show us how to set up the voting machines. Opening up the first voting machine was chilling to me. I’ve voted many times - 10 presidential elections and many other state and city elections. Yet I’ve never noticed the voting machine/space as intensely as I did that night. When the leader showed us how to put the machine together, there was a collective silence. To me, the silence wasn’t only for us to hear our leader but us also a collective reverence for the machine. This machine was one of many in our polling space, in our county, in our state, and in our country that would collect the votes of people voting on Election Day. I realize that when this post is published our president will have already been chosen but at that moment it was an exciting artifact.
Working at the polls for a presidential election is a long day. A really long day. We got to the polling place on Election Day at 5:30 AM and polls were not scheduled to close until 8 PM. When they say, “Polls Close” this means you don’t let anyone new into the line. So if there were a 100 people on line at 8 PM then you stayed open until all of those folks got to vote. Then afterwards, we had to take down the polling place just like we put it up the day before.
So what the heck were we doing at 5:30 AM? All the voting machines were turned on and registered. All of the poll pads (my job) were set up. These machines were used to lookup voters and assign them a key card to use in the voting machines. All of the laptops were setup for the provisional voters - those who had never voted before and needed to register, or those who had problems with their registrations. We also put up all the outdoor signage. There were COVID precautions as well: putting “6 feet away” stickers on the floor. Wiping everything down with sanitizer. Having sanitizer ready for everyone to use. Making sure we had gloves on ourselves and gloves for the voters.
Polls opened at 7 AM. At first business was brisk. We probably had the folks who decided to vote first thing, before going to work. Everyone who voted got their very own stylus. It was used to sign the poll pads and to vote at the voting machines. When someone tried to hand me their stylus back I would say, “It’s your souvenir of the 2020 election!” Some folks laughed. Others seemed unamused. Shortly after the 7 AM rush, things slowed. There was a regular pace, but not many people were arriving. I would like to believe this was because a)there were a number of polling places in Salt Lake County that they could visit and b) a lot of Utahns voted by mail. Still we had a steady stream of customers. Quite a few people spent their time at the provisional table getting registered to vote for the first time.
Just before lunch (around 11 AM) things picked up again and I thought, “Oh the lunch rush is here!”. By 12:15 PM that was over. Then we had what might have been an after school rush between 2:30 PM and 3:30 PM.
Around 4 PM polls started closing on the east coast. While we were at the polling place to help people vote, my poll pad partner (she had her own poll pad at another socially distanced table) was starting to wonder how the presidential and senate elections were going. She started to look at her cell phone. The urge to look at the results was great. Why? Whether I looked at the results or not the results would not change. It didn’t really matter if I started looking when I left the polling place or right at that moment. Yet there was that strong need to know! At 6 PM I checked my phone. I told my poll pad mate I wasn’t looking again until 7 PM. The urge was too great. At 6:45 my nose was in the phone!
That’s not to say we weren’t working. Things picked up for us again around 4:30 PM. We had a busier stream of voters. People came with their children. Some older folks where helped by their children. One woman came with 3 newly registered citizens who were unfamiliar with the process. At 7:30 PM when I thought we would start slowing down, all the voting machines were filled with voters. More new voters were pouring in to register and vote. People were remembering last minute to bring their already filled out ballots into the polling place.
At 8 PM only one voter was left to be processed. The leader announced, “Voting is now closed”. We started to take down some of the materials while there were still voters at the machines. It reminded me of when I worked at a restaurant and we started to refill the salt and pepper shakers at closing time. It was a task that needed to be done, as well as a way for the patrons to be reminded that we were closing for the night. Once the final voters left our takedown process accelerated rapidly. We had to triple count the materials and the aggregate number of voters on all the machines. We had to take down all the voting machines. It was interesting to say goodbye to the equipment we had just met the night before. It was a long day - 16.5 hours.
Overall there was goodness. A third of the people who came in were new voters and we got to register them for the first time. It was powerful seeing all those people at voting booths exercising their rights and I felt empowered being part of the process that enabled them to do so.