Having voted off and on by absentee and in person for decades, the neighborhood polling place in a church or school is a familiar enough experience. But with the health risk from Covid-19 to the oftentimes older (retired) adults who operate the local voting process, many opted to give up their positions. And so the city was eager to train others to take their places. That is how I came to sign up as new poll worker. The pandemic meant that most training would have to be from online materials like video demonstrations and presentations, accompanying PDF and slideshows, links to state-wide videos, and so on.
Typically the Primary, three months ahead of the General, election sees low rates of voter turn-out. But with the quarantine, economic recession, pandemic anxiety, and mayhem from a headless federal government, residents seem to have been more motivated to exercise their voting powers. Whereas other years there might be 8 to 12% who vote in a Primary election, the unofficial result 12 hours after polls closed is 30% voting. For new poll workers the relatively light turn-out makes the process of engaging with in-person voters less stressful because lines of people are rare. Most were able to walk in, write their identifying particulars on the application to vote slip of paper, check-in with the laptop worker to verify particulars of eligibility (convicted felons normally cannot cast a ballot at present in Michigan, absentee voters can surrender their ballot in order to vote in person, etc), be issued a ballot, vote, then stop at the final station (above photo) to tear off security tab before feeding the ballot into the optical scanning tabulator.
Precautions to stop coronavirus transmission included poll workers in masks who sat at tables at least six feet apart, pens sanitized after each use, optional mask & hand sanitizer available to voters, as well. The photo, above, shows the voting booths spaced at least six feet apart, as well, for the stand-up booths and the lower one accessible to wheelchair users, as well as another station for touch-screen (visual assistance terminal) users.
Impressions of the training include the myriad details to get acquainted with. Most voters are routine and follow a fixed pattern that can quickly be learned. But there are a few technical terms to memorize, and even if not mastering all the rare but real cases that fall outside the normal voting process, it is important to recognize things like voter mistakes (crossing party lines when the Primary requires single-party voting) that the tabulator rejects, forms of ID that lack photo but which are still accepted when accompanied by signed affidavit page, and so on.
As for the long day itself, it begins for poll workers at 6 a.m. to set up the school gymnasium to be ready for 7 a.m. public declaration, “The polls are open for voting.” At the stroke of 8 p.m. anybody in the building or waiting in line outdoors can be given an application slip of paper as voucher that shows they met the 8 p.m. cut-off time. No others will be admitted or allowed to cast a ballot. The public declaration is made, “The polls are closed.” With the emphasis around the state on “no reason absentee voting” (earlier referendum passed) and before that the “age 55+ absentee voting” and then most recently the pandemic response by Michigan’s Secretary of State to issue all registered voters an application for absentee voting (requested or not), the number of absentee votes this time was higher than previous years: about 70 voters came to the precinct before 1 p.m. and another 150 came in the afternoon and evening. The other 400+ voters cast their votes by absentee ballot, either sending to the county clerk by mail well before the deadline, or hand-delivering to the streetside dropbox or service counter. A few surrender the ballot at the precinct in order to vote in person. In November the rate of voting can very likely range from 50 to 70%. In the 2020 Presidential (General) election the acrimony may well turn-out 80% of the electorate. For the local precinct that could translate to doubling the volume of in-person voters and the mass of absentee ballots arriving at the central counting site to be something like a tidal wave. So the light operation during the Primary serves as important rehearsal for the pressures of conducting the General Election 12 weeks hence.
One of the early morning voters mentioned her recent naturalization after 20 years with a Green Card (permanent resident, non-US citizen). Although treated more or less the same as US citizens for taxes and administrative purposes, permanent residents cannot cast a vote, except for a few cases of local jurisdictions around the world that specially allow all taxpayers of the city to have voter representation, regardless of passport issuing country. In order to vote in elections this voter decided to complete the naturalization process and so today gladly cast a ballot.
Maybe 1 in 10 voters made a deliberate expression of thanks to the poll workers for making the precinct carry out its work well. Just about all voters (and the children or accompanying helper) wore masks of their own; just one requested a mask supplied by the precinct. At three different points during the day some staff from the coordinating clerk’s office made a personal visit to resupply or answer questions; one staff specifically came to run a mid-stream check of the laptop’s processing of voters. The city consists of 76 precincts, each with a capacity of 2999 voters, so the staff were busy in their stops at all the sites.
Reflections on the experience of interacting with fellow workers and members of the voting public were many. To begin with, the process of setting up and then at the end of the day packing up went very smoothly. Six workers had been scheduled, but only the chair, one city worker (each precinct gets a city worker seconded to the voting site as dual purpose worker & liaison), and two nearby residents — of which one had lots of experience, and me with no prior poll worker experience. The chair is most highly trained, paid most and carries most responsibility, followed by the laptop worker who has special additional training. The two others are given a stipend approximately the same as hourly rates for substitute teachers, $10 to $12 per hour for the long day.
Multiple security checks build integrity into the system, carefully avoiding online communication by devices, requiring multiple signatures at start and end of operations, security USB memory devices and cards, and other security chips and tokens, as well. Taking an oath of office and wearing ID lanyard cards adds to the officialness of the experience, too, with care to have one Democrat and one Republican observe and sign off various things. Countering the formality and dress code, there is some casualness by custom, too. One worker brought some homemade cookies to make the day pass better. Another brought individually wrapped snacks in the interest of minimizing Covid transmission. During lulls in the ebb and flow of voters, poll workers got to know each other in the old-fashioned way of “visiting” that people normally did before texting and social media dampened the art of spontaneous informal conversation.
Details change as technology emerges, but the basic purpose of making practical and effective voting accessible to all who are eligible to exercise their powers remains the same. This day was a moment in history that combined paper ballots for optical scanning and error checking, wireless transmittal of results at the close of voting with dual memory card back up and reconciling, chairperson with dedicated cellphone to reach the coordinating headquarters to handle voting cases falling outside the usual routine, and the precautions for reducing Covid-19 transmission. It is a meaningful expression of democracy in action when neighbors sign up to operate the precinct and fellow citizens make time in their day to vote or to cast their ballot by absentee vote. With the national flag standing bolt upright in the center of the gym and the general hush in the room, a hint of sacred duty or (civic) religion could be felt, knowing that this basic process is the foundation for local and national government by the people and of the people — hopefully it is for the people, too.
