Super Tuesday

Tuesday was the Western States Primary out here. The Republican and Democratic parties paid for the election, so the county had to consolidate the polling places down to lots less of them. We had to go to a different school this time, they put 6 precincts together. (We usually only have 2 in our place.)

Since I was the poll manager, I was in charge of the place. (This is how I like it. In charge, ready to fix whatever happens, that sort of thing. I really don't ever want to be working an election, being a poll worker, having problems, but some other poll manager doing things wrong. That would drive me crazy.)

Anyhow, things were kind of crazy. Lots of people were coming to vote, lots of people were coming to the school but were supposed to be somewhere else, and 3 of the 4 polls workers were little old ladies that really weren't cut out to be there for 15 hours that day.

Having said that, we were able to keep our wait times fairly low. Our longest wait was 20 minutes or so, for the last 3 hours, the wait was usually only 10 or 15 minutes. The secret is to have someone one the registration book that can get to the right name quickly, and get the job done fast and consistent. Putting someone slow on the thing spells disaster. We were completely done with our results back to the county by 9pm, I hear the places around us had very long lines still when we dropped our stuff off. 3 hour lines or longer wasn't an anomaly. This is unacceptable to me. I spent the better part of the last 90 minutes the polls were opened going up and down the line, making sure people were in the right place, making sure they had the right information, that sort of thing. This helped our lines stay down. We had 5 voting machines, we couldn't keep them filled all the time, the bottleneck was still at the registration table, but we also didn't have any problems with the machines or people using the machines, except for one old lady who didn't press the "casts ballot" button. She was hard of hearing, didn't understand what was wrong, and her husband had a hard time explaining it. He finally got through by shouting at her (They were both old and hard of hearing, he wasn't shouting in a mean way) and taking her finger to point at the "cast ballot" button.

I talked to some people the next day about their experiences voting, some of them had problems voting because of the lines. We had one dude show up at our place that was ticked off that the wait in line was going to be 15 minutes. This was unacceptable to him, he stormed off in a huff. I didn't feel sorry for him, really. I basically told the people at work that if they wanted to avoid having voting problems in the future, they should sign up to be poll workers, or better yet, poll managers. The problem is that a lot of the current workers are not capable of doing the job efficiently, and new blood is needed in the process. If you are out there, and had a bad experience voting, contact the county clerk (your local county clerk). Tell he or she that you want to sign up to work the elections at your local polling place. I am sure they could use your help.

There might be problems with the current election process, and there might be problems in other polling locations, but at least I can make sure that my polling place runs things correctly and efficiently...