Part 2, Michigan Poll Worker

Just because we were in a small town and, in places, semi-rural, people were not lax about their right to vote. It seems since absentee voting took off and early voting became a thing, in-person voting has gone to the wayside. Yes and no. People have options now on how they choose to vote. Yet, many people decided to wait and come into the physical polling place during this primary.

The biggest hurdle was that last-minute a few polling places changed due to input from schools that they preferred not to open to the public or be on the list—understandably. So churches and libraries took on more precincts. A few voters asked why they had to vote here instead of their local middle school or said they went past a voting place closer to home and had to drive here. Mostly they wanted to know if they were in the right place. Yes. People are creatures of habit and the ones used to coming to that church to vote had to contend with the question of which precinct? So the first table sorted them out.

All day our precinct and the one opposite of ours switched off having lines of voters or no one. That’s when we ate snacks or ran to the bathroom. I’m not sure our chair ever sat down. She was in constant motion.

At first, because we were slow, it seemed the checking in on our vote tally of number of voters was obsessive, but I saw by keeping an hourly tab, made sure our numbers at closing when doing reports matched up.

Primaries carry the added stipulation that the voter select a party—no mixing and matching. This is a primary where candidates from a particular party are chosen to rep their party in the fall contest. Most people got this, but a few were like, huh? So we had a number of spoiled ballots, where they opted to go back and get a new ballot. The spoiled ballot is not tossed, but written across in bold lettering indicating spoiled and then placed into a special envelope. It is not part of the vote tally, but still kept track of because all the ballots are numbered. It is all about numbers and we assigned each voter a numbered ballot so that the end of the evening the number of voters and ballots, minus the spoiled ones, matched. Whew!

I saw young voters vote for the first time, a mother proudly taking a picture of her son signing the application for a ballot, whole families with multiple generations in line to vote, a young woman who had just moved into the area who had that morning registered at the Township Hall and then got into her car to get to our polling place in time to vote. By the evening there was a constant flow.

People were so kind and encouraging. All day long folks thanks us for our service, appreciated us working the long hours to keep the process going. There was only one instance of a voter being ugly. As she approached our table she let it be known she thought it was “rigged.” Which begged several questions, but we just smiled and swiped her ID and she continued down the line. Before leaving the polls, she stopped again at our table to tell us we were the worse people in the entire country. Really?

At 8 pm the polls closed and we stayed 2 hours to make sure the reports balanced and everything was accounted for, tabs closed, boxes locked, items returned to the collection center at the township hall. At 10 pm I went outside. It was dark when I arrived and dark again. The night air was full of insect noise and fuzzy around the parking lot lights with latent humidity. I pulled my bike out of the parking rack and straddled the bar. I was exhausted, but in my ears was the ringing of a bell and the solemn words of an oath not taken for granted.

 

from worldwide web, stock photo