Working the Polls

I remember thinking this summer about working the polls, and I looked into it a little bit-- and promptly forgot about it. But then a few weeks ago, I watched a Daily Show segment where at the end Trevor Noah suggested there was a poll worker shortage due to coronavirus, and that prompted me to finish my application and send it in shortly before our fall primary.

I don't know what things are like behind-the-scenes in other places, but here in Hillsborough County, the polls are a pretty slick operation. I actually have never voted in person since moving to Florida (anyone can use vote-by-mail here), so my first experience of the polls here was working them! Poll workers here aren't volunteers per se; we actually get paid a couple hundred dollars. I had to watch a bunch of on-line videos and take some quizzes. I think there would have been an in-person training, too, but that was cancelled due to the pandemic, and instead I watched a few long videos that were seemingly recorded Zoom sessions (so I assume if I'd signed up earlier, I would have had to attend these Zoom sessions).

I was initially assigned to a polling place pretty close to our house, but the day before set-up got reassigned to a different one even closer to our house, actually the one we would vote at if we voted in person, a big Protestant church (one of those ones whose denomination is vague). (This meant that there was a part of voting where a Christian rock band was practicing in the next room. Also the church apparently operates a day care and exercise classes.) Set-up is the Monday prior to the election, and mostly involves stuff like arranging the space (positioning check-in tables, voting booths, and so on). Each location has a clerk and assistant clerk who are kind of in charge, and then all the other poll workers (me included) are "inspectors"; our location had over a dozen inspectors assigned. This all took just over an hour. Both our clerk and assistant clerk were new to their positions, and the church hadn't been used as a polling place for a few years, so no one was familiar with the site; I gather both of these things made it go a little slower.

(I was never removed from the text chain for the polling place I was originally assigned to; I intuited from its messages that the clerk and most of the inspectors assigned there had already been assigned there many times before. They apparently also usually did a potluck dinner for set-up, but not in the era of coronavirus!)

The polls are open from 7am to 7pm, and all poll workers are required to be there from an hour ahead of time through the conclusion of packing up, which takes about an hour, so it is a long day! I ended up tasked with placing signs during set-up: arrows saying "VOTE" that had to guide cars from the street to the actual polling place in the church lobby, and signage indicating parking and social distancing guidelines and so on. Different inspectors rotate in and out of the "deputy" position, who maintains order outside of the polling place, and I also helped the deputy measure out the 150 feet radius from the doors: no one is allowed to campaign within that zone, which is marked by cones.

There were five "ePollbooks" for checking people in, but many of the poll workers bagsied those quickly so I didn't get to do that. It was interesting to note how much more high-tech the Florida set-up is than what I was used to in Connecticut. In Connecticut, they crossed your name off a paper list; in Florida, they can swipe your driver's license through the ePollbook (or search your name if you don't have one) and pull up your record; it will indicate where you should be voting, and if you got a mail-ballot, and even if it was returned. (If you got a mail-in ballot but didn't send it in, you can vote day-of; you just have to either surrender it, or promise you will destroy it when you can.) If someone has moved into the county, the poll workers can even search the state voter database and pull their record into Hillsborough County!

After checking in, voters get a ballot style ticket and take that to the ballot table, where the exchange it for the ballot they need. (Our polling place covered four different precincts, and you would also of course get a different ballot depending on what party you were a member of.) You vote, and then head out; there is an "Exit Inspector" who hands out what our training always called "the ever-popular 'I Voted' stickers." (The training isn't lying; I can think of no other context in which I've seen so many adults get excited about stickers.) There are also "Future Voter" stickers for the kids!

Voters can ask for assistance from poll workers; the poll worker who assists you needs to be registered with the same party. From how the clerk asked for volunteers for this, I am pretty sure that of our dozen-plus workers, just two were Republicans. One of those two mentioned driving over half an hour to get to the polling place, so they must distribute poll workers to get ones of each party at each polling place. Most of the other poll workers seemed to live five minutes away at most, like me. (You can also bring your own person to assist you, but they have to sign a form that says they don't represent your employer or your union!)

I ended up being the "DS200 Inspector" and also the "Floor Inspector" (in theory people rotate, but it didn't seem to happen much in practice). The DS200 is the machine where people insert their ballots once they've filled them out, and I helped guide people to it (it was sort of awkwardly positioned, so it wasn't super obvious what you were looking at if you were coming from the booths), and also helped them actually stick the ballot in if they needed the help. We had two DS200s, which is good, because the ballots kept getting stuck in one after scanning, and the clerk had to keep clearing the jams; after five ballots, it started rejecting every ballot. The clerk just had us cover that machine, but mid-morning someone from the Supervisor of Elections office stopped by to see how things were going, and he called in a support ticket; in pretty short order, a guy came out from the main office and fixed it. We could have definitely got by on one machine, though.

DS200 Inspector is a pretty undemanding job. I think just five people had problems greater than getting their ballots into the machine. One's ballot was rejected because instead of bubbling the circles, he just put X's in them. One accidentally double-voted in a race but decided he didn't care and told the machine to take it anyway (they means it will ignore his vote in that particular race). The other three had errant marks of various sorts, meant they have to turn in their ballot and get a new one, which is actually sort of an involved process where they have to sign some kind of oath. I talked a lot to the Exit Inspector, an older fellow for whom this was also his first election, and that rarest of creatures, a Tampa native.

(There's also a machine called the ExpressVote, designed to help people with disabilities fill out ballots (it has audio prompts, for example), but no one used it. As Floor Inspector, I periodically checked the voting booths for left-behind materials; I think I removed just four discarded privacy sleeves all day.)

We had some coronavirus precautions. We all wore masks (and some of us face shields). This was actually my first experience wearing a mask for more than an hour's trip to the grocery store; I can't say that I was fond of it! Voters also had to wear masks; I don't think anyone ever argued about this, though as you'll know if you've gone anywhere, some were better about wearing them properly than others. We also reduced transmission risks by not collecting pens (people also get very excited when you tell them they can keep pens) and using disposable privacy sheets instead of reusable ones.

I don't think the Deputy ever had to yell at anyone for violating the solicitation barrier; there was a young woman who had a megaphone to shout about a particular candidate for judge. I think there were only two campaign people all day, and neither stayed the whole time; this again contrasted strongly to what I saw in Connecticut, where there were always big crowds of people from the campaign outside the polling place. There were a huge number of campaign signs out by the street, though, which somehow appeared between when set-up ended at 7:30pm and I got to the polling place at 6am! I assume there will probably be more campaigners during the general.

When I was outside taking a mask-free break, I did have a guy get huffy that he couldn't drop off his mail-in ballot (you can only do that at an early-voting site, or at a Supervisor of Elections office).

In the morning, we averaged about 30 ballots per hour, but things picked up during the lunch hour, and also became pretty steady from 3pm onward. We never had a line of more than one or two people waiting to check in, but we also never had a completely dead time. By the end of the twelve hours, we had 609 voters come through our location in all.

One voter arrived about three minutes after 7pm, and had to be turned away. Another arrived at about 8pm, when we were almost done tearing down. I was the one who ended up talking to her; she asked if we were still open (no!), and if she could go vote anywhere else, like on-line! (also no)

Tear-down was a little tricky, in that several procedures sort of bottleneck around the clerk, and the clerk has a ton to do in tear-down. One of my favorite things is that the results actually get taped to the door of the polling place; I assume this is a holdover from pre-Internet days where this was how initial results were distributed to the public. The results take the form of reports that the DS200s print on receipt tape; each one is probably over six feet long! It looks silly.

Observers from campaigns can watch set-up and tear-down and the process of voting; members of the media can watch set-up and tear-down. No one did.

By the end of the day, my legs were sore; the stool I had wasn't comfortable, so I spend a lot of time standing. I was also pretty hungry despite packing what I thought was a decent amount of food! But I had a decent time, and even read about a hundred pages of The Relentless Moon in snatches between busy times. I will definitely be back in the fall for the general (I teach M/W/F this semester, so it is easy for me to have Tuesdays off), and I am glad I did it, and glad I got to do my thing for democracy.