Randy Fitzgerald

When my 26-year-old son, Kyle, called us about two weeks ago, Barb asked him his thoughts on the results of the presidential election. 

            “Well,” said Kyle—a huge opponent of big government and the two-party system—“I was sorry Obama won, and I was glad McCain lost.”

            “So whom did you vote for then?” Barb asked him.

            “Oh, I just wrote in Dad’s name,” he said.

            Gee, that was the second vote ever for me for president! 

The first one came from Barb. She has worked for about a dozen years as an election officer in the city in a precinct adjoining our own, and when she had her annual training on voting machines a few weeks before the election, she brought home the tape from her practice machine showing that she had written in my name just for fun.

            Few people realize how much training poll workers must undergo, how hard they have to work, the great responsibilities they feel toward the job, and what a long day they put in. On election day Barb left the house at 4:45 to join about ten other workers in setting up the voting machines, getting everything organized and getting sworn in before the crowds arrived and the polls opened at 6 a.m. For this year’s presidential election, there are two eager voters waiting when she got there, and when the polls opened, there were about a hundred waiting. Her precinct served about 300 voters in the morning hours, and then a constant stream all day. Well over 80% of the registered voters in that precinct voted on Election Day, including a number of young people voting for the first time.

            When the first-time voters made themselves known, the poll workers gave each of them a round of applause. Barb said in all her years working the polls, she had never seen so many new voters and such a spirited turnout. The phrase “Democracy in Action” kept coming to her, she said.

            Though she’s been an election officer for so many years, Barb still has to take a number of hours of re-training before each election.  A few weeks prior to voting, she’ll inevitably spend most of a Saturday down at City Hall, going over rules and regulations with folks from the electoral board, and then she’ll take the class on machines once again—often on another day altogether. There’s a class on paperwork that she takes every now and then as well, and for each day she undergoes training, the city sends her a check for about $15. One year she got a parking ticket during training that took care of her $15 stipend for about five years!

            Not only do poll workers put in a lot of hours both during training and on voting day, but once they arrive at the polls in the early morning darkness, they are not allowed to leave the polling place for anything until the last vote has been tallied, the results called in, the machines put away and the place put back in order. Sometimes that means a 17-hour day, a lot of it in Barb’s case sitting in front of a poll book for most of that time. She has to pack her own sandwich for lunch because there’s certainly no going out for a bite, and since there’s nowhere to sit and eat privately in her precinct, she and her co-workers eat lunch one by one standing up in a small kitchen. There is no “lunch hour,” just a few stolen minutes.

            Barb says that ex-poll workers who know what the job is like sometimes show up at the precinct with boxes of cookies, a homemade cake, fruit, candy—all kinds of treats for the often beleaguered poll workers.  “We may eat standing up,” she says, “but sometimes we eat well.”

            While former poll workers know that the election officials are there as a labor of love—nobody every did this job for the money, I assure you—voters seem pretty much unaware that the fellow who leads them to the booth, the lady who takes their name and finds it in the poll book, the man who demonstrates the machines, the person who greets them at the door, the person who resolves any problem—that all of those people are basically volunteers. Some weeks after the election they get a token check, and it’s so small that I don’t even remember what Barb’s usually is, but I know she takes me to lunch on it.

Since she’s been working the polls, I have a new appreciation for the good citizens who do that job. As anyone who deals with the public can attest, there are all kinds of folks out there, some of them very pleasant to deal with and others who aren’t. Barb’s always amazed at how many voters don’t think they should have to give their name and address, or how many don’t want her to repeat that name and address aloud, as state law requires. Though there is a sign on display explaining the law, there are always a few who say, “You have my ID in your hand—why are you asking me to say my address?”  There are always a few who are snippy or unresponsive, and there are sometimes even a few who are drunk.

There are also a good many who stop back by Barb’s table after voting to say “thank you.”  I told her that I try to remember to do that myself, both because I know what a hard job it is and also because I think it’s especially important for me to remember the little people now that I’ve been a presidential candidate myself.

Of course, it deflated me a bit to find out that in Barb’s precinct, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck both got more write-in votes than I did!