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adventures of a novice election judge
Aug. 10th, 2006 09:25 amTuesday was our primary, and I was an election judge for the very first time. Which sounds fancy and important, but most of the job involves looking up would-be voters in the big registration book and verifying eligibility, giving them ballots or directing them to the newfangled touchscreen thingy, and giving them the little "I VOTED" sticker. In other words, it's a long day of clerical work (6 am to 8 pm) for $100, which works out to...more than minimum wage, anyway.
Here in southwest Colorado we didn't have quite the high-profile race that Connecticut had, but we had a single contested race - the Democratic candidate for state representative in the 59th District. As you might expect, the turnout was light, with far more Democrats than Republicans, and quite a few unaffiliated voters filling out declaration forms at the polls so they could vote in the contested Dem race. ( And then there was the weird stuff. )
The precincts I was a judge for (we had two combined) had our polling place in the county courthouse, ( which turned out to be an interesting place to be... ) We ended up redirecting (we decided that "turning away" had the wrong connotation!) about a hundred people, slightly more than actually voted at our polling place.
This was the first year that our county had touchscreen voting machines - each polling place had one, in addition to the Accu-Vote optical scan system that we had used before. ( These are pretty cool machines, actually. )
All in all, it was kind of like having a yard sale: chatting with people I knew and people I vaguely recognized from the neighborhood, exchanging paperwork, a little bit of reading in slow times (and amusingly enough, the last person who had checked out the library book I was reading, according to the receipt still in it, was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
de_wynken), plus the do-gooder glow of knowing I was performing a civic duty. At the end of the day I signed all the ballot tallies and put the various things in the various containers and delivered them to the official counters, then went to Carver's and had a couple of pints of beer.
So, now that I've had some low-key practice, I guess I'll be doing it again for the general election.
Here in southwest Colorado we didn't have quite the high-profile race that Connecticut had, but we had a single contested race - the Democratic candidate for state representative in the 59th District. As you might expect, the turnout was light, with far more Democrats than Republicans, and quite a few unaffiliated voters filling out declaration forms at the polls so they could vote in the contested Dem race. ( And then there was the weird stuff. )
The precincts I was a judge for (we had two combined) had our polling place in the county courthouse, ( which turned out to be an interesting place to be... ) We ended up redirecting (we decided that "turning away" had the wrong connotation!) about a hundred people, slightly more than actually voted at our polling place.
This was the first year that our county had touchscreen voting machines - each polling place had one, in addition to the Accu-Vote optical scan system that we had used before. ( These are pretty cool machines, actually. )
All in all, it was kind of like having a yard sale: chatting with people I knew and people I vaguely recognized from the neighborhood, exchanging paperwork, a little bit of reading in slow times (and amusingly enough, the last person who had checked out the library book I was reading, according to the receipt still in it, was
de_wynken), plus the do-gooder glow of knowing I was performing a civic duty. At the end of the day I signed all the ballot tallies and put the various things in the various containers and delivered them to the official counters, then went to Carver's and had a couple of pints of beer.So, now that I've had some low-key practice, I guess I'll be doing it again for the general election.