Election judge report

 As I mentioned, I worked as an election judge yesterday.  I learned a lot, got to interact with quite a few fellow citizens, and drew some conclusions about voting in our republican democracy. What follows are a few miscellaneous observations from yesterday's experience.  

I received my precinct assignment just four days before the election.  The county clerk's office had warned us that we may not know our assignment until the day before election day, and many people would not get assigned at all.  My county, Cook County, IL, needs about 8,500 election judges to fully staff its precincts, but for this election over 15,000 of us signed up and took the requisite training (which was only available online for this cycle).   Veteran judges with whom I spoke yesterday said that this surplus of volunteers is not typical; and it certainly runs counter to the narrative which took hold during the primary season, in which Americans had been led to believe that fear of COVID was causing judges to stay home and forcing voting sites to shut down, perhaps even suppressing votes.  My speculation is that more people volunteered this time because, frankly, more people need the money; the job pays over $100 for giving up a day of one's time (a long day, to be sure, and for many of us it spilled over into the previous evening as well, when we set up the voting equipment - more about that below).  

So why did I get a precinct assignment when thousands of others didn't?  That I identified myself as a Republican probably worked to my advantage: the county seeks to have five judges at each precinct, with three Democrats and two Republicans in Democratic-leaning precincts, and the opposite split in Republican-leaning precincts (of which there are relatively few in Cook County).  Even here in the suburbs, the number of Republicans seems to be waning, although we haven't quite reached Woolly Mammoth status yet.  My assigned precinct had a 3:2 Democratic judge majority, and my fellow Republican judge confessed that he really is a Democrat, but wore the Republican badge because he's more interested in helping people than identifying with a party.  And there was no discernable partisanship on my particular panel; we all were there to help, we all sought to help everyone, and in my view, we all worked together pretty harmoniously.  No culture war going on, at our table anyway.

I was also extremely fortunate that the precinct to which I was assigned had its voting location at the very same place where I usually vote, our local public elementary school.  It is a three block walk from my home.

The precinct I worked yesterday has a specific demographic profile: 100% of its voters are residents of a very large Lutheran-run elderly-residence complex, consisting of independent living housing, assisted living housing, and a large nursing home operation.  The campus occupies nearly a square mile a few blocks from my home.  If we hadn't been in the midst of a pandemic, that precinct's voting would have taken place right on-campus, where, some veteran judges told me, the turnout traditionally is exceptionally high, because the voting is set up outside the campus's main cafeteria, and many residents vote on their way into or out of meals.  But because of COVID-19, outsiders like us aren't allowed on campus, so the precinct was moved several blocks away to the school, and any residents who wished to vote had to travel there.  The complex ran free shuttle bus service for them on election day, but many of the residents don't get around too well.  

So it was a slow day for us yesterday.  My assigned precinct had, all told, 23 voters throughout the day.  That was considerably better than the primary election last spring, also at the school, for which only four(!) voters showed up.

Three other precincts also voted at the school.  Two of us occupied the school lunchroom, while the other two were set up in the adjoining gymnasium.  I mentioned that it was a slow voting day for us; the other three precincts, which cover more typical residential areas, also had slow days.  That school is my usual voting location, and there have been elections in the past at which I've had to wait in line for a half hour just to check in to vote, with lines especially long before and after the workdays.  But except for a brief burst of go-getters when we opened the doors at 6 am, there was none of that yesterday.

But that is not to say that voting was down.  In fact, the Chicago Tribune reported today that voting records probably were set yesterday.  But much of that voting was done early.  One of my fellow judges had worked the early-voting operation at our local city hall, and he said the lines have been long throughout the voting season.  And most of the voters in my household (including me) voted by mail this year.

It seems that most of the elderly residents of yesterday's precinct had done the same: something like 475 of the elderly "village" residents  are registered voters, of which 370 of had voted early.

My belief is that early voting and by-mail voting is quickly settling in as the new normal, and I expect that most people will vote those ways going forward.  The pandemic has forced many of us out of old habits like voting in person on election day, and now that we have tried the alternatives, we can see the advantages.  I also believe that mail-in and early in-person voting will be supplemented, very soon, by secure ways of voting from a computer or cell phone.  States like Pennsylvania which don't start processing or counting votes until the polls close, are going to need to wake up and smell the coffee.  As we are seeing from President Trump's predictably but irresponsibly premature claims of electoral victory and voter fraud (the two claims don't seem to complement one another, but that's a different topic), there are good reasons of civil peace and order to get election results processed and announced promptly.

Some other lessons and observations from yesterday's experience:

• Voting at polling places is becoming more high-tech, and the technology is stressing the volunteer judges who are responsible for setting up and taking down the polling places.  Each precinct had two vote-by-touchscreen booths, along with five of the more traditional paper ballot booths.  Each touchscreen station has a laser printer which prints up completed ballots.  We also check in the voters on laptop computers rather than with the traditional paper voter rolls.   Each laptop comes with a label printer which spits out labels which must be pasted in designated places in the voting logbook.  Completed ballots (both paper ballots and the laser-printed touchscreen ballots) are scanned by a scanner which stores the election results on a memory card before depositing the ballots in the ballot box.  All this equipment is connected to the Internet via a Mifi device (a sort of portable, wireless router).  Any hardware component on any of these devices can fail; and all of them run software which also can fail.  The judges, most of whom know no more (and some a good deal less) about technology than any other average person, are responsible for having all this hi-tech gear set up and operational in time for voting to start at 6 am.  In practice, that means that judges must set up the precinct the night before (if they don't have other obligations and the voting site will grant them access to the building), or else run the risk that technology glitches will cause the polls to open late on election day.  The county clerk has a tech support line to call if there are equipment failures; hold times were long.  In our case, one of our two touchscreen voting stations didn't work because its internal clock was set to the wrong time zone, which sounds like something which shouldn't matter but apparently does.  We were not able to figure out how to reset the time zone (for security reasons, much of this equipment is "locked down", which means that poor dopes like us aren't allowed to reconfigure it), and when we called the service desk, we were told (after being on hold for an hour) that a field technician would have to be dispatched.  This all happened before 8 am on election day; the field technician didn't make it to our site until 6 pm, which turned out to be after our last voter had shown up to vote.  The non-functional voting station was the one which was set at the height which allows wheelchair-bound or seated voters to vote, which was a large percentage of our elderly voters.  So our voters either had to stand to vote, or sit in front of the standing-height touchscreen and reach upward, or do a paper ballot.  
• Our elderly people need a lot of assistance to vote.  Just walking through the door to the registration table tired some of them out.  A half-dozen or so came with live-in nurses/helpers; these helped them to vote, as they help them with virtually all aspects of their lives.  We ended up setting up a little table for some of them to sit together and review and mark up the ballot together; because many of the elderly also were hard of hearing, their conversations were loud, so everyone in the room knew how s/he was voting, but the elderly voters all said they didn't care.  I had one voter who "overvoted", meaning that she had voted for more than one candidate in a race, so the scanner spit her ballot back out.  She couldn't find the problem so asked us to help her.  With her permission we pointed out to her that she had voted for both Biden and Trump.  We told her she could have another ballot and vote again.  This time she asked us to fill it out for her.  We asked her who she wanted to vote for.  Her nurse-minder was pretty vehement that her client wanted to vote for Biden, but when we finally got the question through to the lady herself, who was quite deaf, she yelled "Trump!" Several others found the whole affair confusing and needed us to explain how to vote.  One woman I assisted voted "No" for every judge who was up for retention.  Every fiber in my being wanted to tell her that this was not responsible and she was voting against some very good judges, but of course we're not permitted to give voting recommendations so I bit my tongue.