Election day

I went to work the election this morning. We were doing pretty good, we had 5 of 13 machines up and ready when the polls opened at 7am, and the other 8 were half way there. I called the County Clerk at 7am as we were opening, (as per there instructions) and we had 20 people ready to vote. As I was talking to them, the first guy came up, and his voting card did not work. (We were using electronic voting, with card readers. Turns out all the machines did the same thing.) The clerks office put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back and said "We are getting a lot of those calls, let me call you back." That was fine, but there were 20 people there wanting to vote, several of which had to leave soon and didn't have time to come back. After 20 minutes of waiting I called back, and was on hold. All in all, I was on hold for over an hour. In the meantime, someone was very irate about the problem, he left, came back still mad, and I used his anger to my own advantage. I sent him down to the County Clerk's office to talk to them. He came back 10 minutes later to let me know what the clerks office was telling people on the phone, 5 minutes later, we were voting. (About 8am.) By the time they answered the phone, we were just fine. (We had to use a voting machine to encode the cards, instead of the little encoder devices.) I think we only lost 6 total people to leaving and not coming back overall.

A news crew came over with cameras. I nearly kicked them out once, they were trying to film the screens as people voted. Then someone else came by looking for sound clips about the outage earlier. I'm not sure that he got what he was looking for, I of all people know how to water down the impact statement of an outage. (Or build it up, if it suits my purpose...)

Someone came in with a George Bush mask on. I told him he needed to take it off to vote, he wasn't voting, was just waiting for someone, so I told him he needed to wait around the corner in the lobby. (I figured it was just to annoy me anyway, so why keep him in my sight?) It turns out that he went to the lobby, and was trying to tell people how to vote, the principal told him that masks were not allowed in the school. Several hours later, I got a call from the County Clerk asking about what happened, the local paper got wind that someone was thrown out of the polling place for wearing a mask, they were looking for the real story to tell the paper to take a hike. I explained what happened, and let her know that we didn't throw him out, and we were fairly polite about it, the guy was likely just trying to get attention anyway. She asked if I had called the Authorities to have him escorted out, which most definitely did not happen. (Not to mention the fact that if I had him tossed out of the place, he would known he had been kicked out, no doubt about it. Everyone around the place would have known it to. I could have called the cops in that event, I could have played "Bad Cop" to Drew's "Good Cop.") It's silly.

We averaged over 1 person a minute for the overall day. I did not even crack open the book I brought. I didn't get to eat as much chips and salsa as I wanted to.

They had a rover assigned, we saw him at 8:30am, after we were already up and running, which he was happy about. He voted in our polling place, then we didn't see him again until 8:30pm. He said that all the other polling places around us had all kinds of problems, they were calling him all day, he was glad to have us run things smoothly.

I ended up getting 53 total emails today. That's too many, even if I'm at work. It appears that a number of people forgot I was working the election.