The Western States Primary is on Super Tuesday. (Super for the news people, it means they can talk all day long...) The county requires the election judges to go to training every election. (Mostly because of all the people who didn't understand what they were being told the first time.) I am the poll manager, so I always have to go to 2 sessions for every election. There were 2 elections last year, there are 3 this year. Yippie.
This time, the county combined a bunch of precincts into one location. We normally deal with 2 precincts, and stay busy the whole day, this time we have 6 precincts, I fully expect it to be a zoo.
The basic training was pretty slow again, the guy only got through 8 slides in the first hour. I was a half hour late for that one, he didn't seem to care. They only got to the practice on the voting machine part when there was 10 minutes left before the class was supposed to end. Kirk and I set up our machine, but there must have been something wrong with the card the trainer guy gave us, the machine kept saying it was encoded wrong. He gave us a different one, we got the same results. He gave up, told us we could break the machine down and leave. So we did, happily, and fast, before he could change his mind.
Yesterday was the advanced class. I came a half hour late again, it was the same trainer, he still didn't seem to mind. When I walked in, he was already 1/2 way through his slides. (There were only 5 of us in the class.) The advanced class is for the poll managers it is supposed to be much more hands on with the machines. The trainer broke each of the machines in about 4 different ways, but unlike last time, this guy actually told us about it. I had my problems figured out and my machine completely up and ready in no time. (It's not like he did anything complicated...) I stood around for about 10 minutes waiting because one of the other guys was having all kinds of trouble setting his machine up, and it was making the trainer nervous. Finally the trainer just told me I could break my thing down and go. Sweet. The class was 90 minutes long, and I missed the first 30 minutes. That made up for him taking the full 3 hours Thursday...
2 comments:
what do you get out of being an elelction judge?
The sense of having done your small part in helping the Democratic process along. In my civic duty, it's not like I'm patrolling the streets, or being deployed in defense of the country...
That and $180. (For being the poll manager. The Poll Worker gets $100...
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