Election day

On Tuesday I ran the polling place down at the elementary school. We show up at 6am to get things started and get ready for the polls to open at 7am. Normally what I do is get one machine going, then work on three at a time, then get all the rest going. They are nearly always all ready by 7am, but this election they gave me 21 machines to work on. There was no way all those machines were going to be up and running by 7am.

By 6:30am the line started queuing up outside the door. I had something like 8 or 10 machines going at 7am, and we had hundreds of people come in the door all at once. It was insanity. It took me until nearly 8am to get all the machines going because of all the people trying to vote.

By about 9:30am, order had been restored, we got rid of our lines, things stayed busy, just no waiting. (All our machines were in use at once more plenty of times during the day.) I fully expected to have insanity rear its ugly head again by 6pm, but at about 6:30pm, things went completely and totally dead. We did over 1500 voters Tuesday, only about 100 of them in the last 2 hours. We have early voting out here, a couple of the poll workers got bored and counted up the number of early voters for our polling place, 800 people early voted. I guess it works to get the lines down on election day. (Although it would have been nice to start out with our normal 6 voters right at 7am...)

By late afternoon my back, calves, and feet just out and out hurt. Normally I get time to sit, but not this election. It took me about 3 full days to feel like I could walk normally again. My biggest consolation of the day was at the end, when I was reconciling voters to votes, and they balanced. It saves a lot of time when the numbers balance...