election hangover

Music: Arcadia: So Red the Rose (1985)

Although there is plenty to say about the returns and "voter mandates," and although my desire to blog about Britney and Kevin is increasingly intense, today I thought I'd share a little of my in-the-trenches experience as a poll worker on Tuesday. The short version is this: yesterday I was absolutely wiped-out; I barely got out bed, and I was downing Red Bull all day just to be alert enough to read email and talk on the phone.

Part of the reason I was wiped out is that the spirit of volunteerism so lauded by my conservative colleagues doesn’t live here in Austin. Across Travis county the polls were short-handed. Myself and others processed almost 1200 voters. We started at 6:00 a.m. (barely getting the machines up and running---it was very, very stressful) and polls opened at 7:00 a.m. It was a constant stream of people, and at times the line apparently wound around the facility. If you were in the line when the polls closed at 7:00 p.m., you got to vote. Our last voter left at 8:30 p.m. We were finally finished at 9:25 p.m. I crawled into bed sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m. (it's all a blur). For added insult, they were announcing the victory of conservative schmuck Rick Perry on my drive home. Overworked volunteers helped hundreds of thousands of people to elect an official who claims volunteerism will fill the gaps of service-cutting. Oh Charles Murray: what have you wrought?

Regardless, I was the only "Lap Top Clerk" in my crew. My job was to take ID from the voter, look them up in the database, confirm their address, ask if they still live at the same address, processes their precinct determination (which assigned them one of four ballots), print off two labels, and then hand the labels to a person on my right or left depending on which side I could spy open booths . . . but because the line was long and I was sitting down, I couldn't really see and often got barked at for sending someone to a "full side." Anyway, there was a scanner for bar coding on the back of Texas driver's licenses and voter registration cards. Of course, the scanner did not work, so I had to manually type in numbers on the keyboard. Of course, the county election people did not input most of the state's driver's license records, so I had to search for everyone who presented a driver's license by name based on tax rolls. Eventually I got pretty darn speedy at this---at times too speedy for my co-workers---but I was always slowed down because someone had a "change of address." This was a major pain in the ass, because it meant that I had to send the person away to the judge to fill out a "change of residency" form and "call it in to central." The judge was on the phone almost all day doing this; waits on average were 30 minutes. Sometimes the "change of address" line seemed almost as long as the voting line. I have this message for voters: don’t decide to effing change your address two days or two hours before election day!

I'm resisting the temptation to make this a bitch-fest, so let me get the bitching out of my system and move on to the good stuff. I'll do this topically by referencing a really bad 1966 film by Clint Eastwood:

The Ugly

Aside from my aching buttocks, back, and wrists, the worst part of election day was Mr. Righteous Voter. We had three of these people. Since I was the first worker they dealt with, I got the brunt of their righteousness. First, it would start with "I have a question." The question always involved something about anonymity, or "how am I assured that you are not tracking me?" The way electronic voting works---which was mandated to be implemented across the country by 2012 or something like that, I don't remember (or care)---is that once I verify you are who you claim to be, you are then given a code for one of the "E-Slate" voting thingies. You punch this code in and then get the specific ballot for your precinct, and then you use some BIG ASS BUTTONS and a dial (like on the iPod, but BIGGER) to select your choices and vote. All of the E-Slates are daisy-chained to a JBC or "Judge Ballot Controller" that both issues your code and tallies your vote. Now, I'm not gonna say these machines cannot be fucked with---I’m sure they could. But I worked all day on Monday with the voting people and saw the "behind the scenes" stuff. If anyone is tampering with the voting machines, it's the manufacturers. If anyone wanted to throw an election by tampering with the voting machines, it would have to be a conspiracy the likes of which we have never seen---it's just impossible, unless, of course, it is done by the manufacturer of these machines.

Anyway, Mr. Righteous Voter would usually start with me about this (with hundreds of people behind him in line) and then when I tried to pass him off, he would keep going on bitching to whomever would listen. One guy pulled out a very crumpled article on electronic voting conspiracy theory and waved it in front of us, detailing how easily his vote could be tracked. Two of these suspicious creatures also demanded paper ballots, whereupon I had to quote from my Texas election guide a statute that says no paper ballots can be used if electronic voting is also being used at the same precinct. "The opportunity to use a paper ballot is via absentee," I said to one guy. This made him mad, of course.

A third Mr. Righteous Voter was angry with me because, even though he moved two years ago and did not bother to change his license address or voter registration address (which by law you are supposed to do within thirty days), I could not, by law, let him vote without proof of address. Now, in Texas this can be damn near anything: a check with your name and address printed on it, a business card, a grocery store discount card. He did not have anything with his current address on it and kept saying "they should contact us and tell us this stuff." "It's in the newspaper," said one of the volunteers. After he kept berating me and my colleagues for at least a minute about our failures to personally contact him to tell him the voting law had changed, I finally lost it. "Look, sir, no one of us has anything to do with the law; we're simply under oath to follow it." I said we were all volunteers and powerless to change the world for him, and that we're here out of our dedication to the electoral process and so on. Eventually he apologized. The judge let him vote anyway just to get rid of him (it is in her power to do so, actually, by law!).

The Bad

My voting place was in a retirement home, which meant almost all the residents there voted, and some of them were in wheelchairs and motorized vehicles. One speedy elderly woman was not in full control of her scooter. She ran over someone's foot in line. And, after I processed her she ran into the table and, realizing her mistake, backed-up quickly . . . with many of my cables stuck in the front wheel of her scooter. Although we averted disaster (I was able to plug everything back in and get up and running in about two minutes), it just goes to show you: if any one voter was determined to disenfranchise hundreds of voters, all she needed to do was give the daisy chain one good yank, or "accidentally" spill coffee on my lap top.

Another bad thing about the electoral process: across the country, the average age of voter volunteers is 75. Yet, we're under a mandate to convert voting to digital and electronic machines; computers are now the centerpieces of this process. Folks in their 70s are not fond of computers. They are frightened of them, and do not have what most computer literate people would call "common sense." The consequence of this was that I had virtually no breaks all day. I did get a brief lunch break---about five minutes to woof down a frozen dinner one of the retirement home staff heated for me---but was hailed back to the voting room because the alternate judge could not figure out how to close a search window in the voter registration program. Same story when I left to use the restroom about four in the afternoon; in the time it took me to pee, almost all the booths were empty and no one was getting processed (again, it had to do with a search window closure issue). If my experience was at all symptomatic of the whole, we need more younger, computer savvy volunteers in this country.

The Good

We assisted a woman who was 102 years old in a voting booth; she was alert and in full control of her faculties, and announced she was a democrat. Watching the volunteers help her vote and assist her make me cry a little. I'm a romantic, what can I say?

The majority of voters were excited to vote. You could feel it in the room, folks seemed almost giddy, and many of them were complimentary of the volunteers ("thank you for doing this for us," one woman said nearing the end of the evening). There was nothing "mundane" to most folks about the experience of voting; everyone seemed like they were on a mission, as if they were serving some greater purpose. This optimism made the day whiz by rather quickly. Even Mr. Righteous Voter was part of the overall sense of importance that seemed to fill the room.

I have to say that, although I am, by default, cynical, I believe in the power of voting as a means of representation. It ain't perfect, for sure. But Rumsfeld got canned yesterday, and there are a lot of new faces in Congress. Kinky Friedman didn't have a chance in hell---but the fact is, he still could have won. That it is in the realm of possibility Kinky could have been the next Jesse Ventura, that a warmonger has been deposed and that we have a new, Democratic congress---these things are worthy of volunteering. I urge every reader to do so next year.