Adventures in Working the Poles

Politics & News
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Several weeks ago I started exploring the possibility of helping out with the election as a poll worker. I wasn’t particularly interested in working on election day at a polling site, but 80% of my state votes by mail so I knew there would be work to do related to transporting and processing the ballots.

I have been locked down pretty tight for 7 months and unfortunately covid cases are on the rise again, but I’m pretty confident the risk will be kept as low as possible. I just figure this election is very important, and I want the ballots to be counted quickly and accurately. So I’m willing to let my guard down a bit for a few weeks.

I went through an online application process, a brief phone interview, and a background check.

I found out yesterday that I will be starting work on Monday at the Ballot Tabulation Center. Signature verification has been ongoing since ballots were mailed last week, but we can’t actually start counting ballots until 2 weeks before election day. So Monday is training day and we go to work on Tuesday. I’ll be working with bipartisan teams to determine “the intent of the voter” in cases where the ballot can’t be ready by the machine. As an aside, it’s sort of mind-blowing that they allow this work to be done by OFP (ordinary fucking people) with a few hours of training.

If nothing else, I’m hopeful that keeping super-busy will free my mind from election-related anxiety for the next couple of weeks.

So is anybody else working as a poll worker? If not, maybe this will just be my temporary blog. :-)

Apologies to anybody who thought this thread would be about me trying to make it in the adult entertainment industry.

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Sounds like it’ll be interesting. A friend was part of the counting for the last French Presidential election and hearing his trip report was enjoyable.

Here it’s all done on the night in each polling location, and he was one third of many teams of three that opened and counted ballots. I’m not sure he had any training beyond what he got on the night, but you don’t actually mark ballots here, you just put a pre-printed piece of paper in an envelope (after having to take at least two candidate’s pieces of paper into the booth with you to stuff the envelope.)

One of his team was apparently a woman in her 80s who claimed to have never left her arrondissement (a sub-division of Paris) which is about 1/2 a square mile of the City, and which has no visible borders apart from the street signs having a different number underneath according to which one you’re in. I’d guess this sort of public service attracts ‘characters’ all over the world, so enjoy!

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I will not be working the polls myself but I’m in for stories from the people that do.

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Thank you so much for doing this. We need more people under the age of 80 working the polls!

As for me, the reason my paid gig goes until Nov 15th is because after the election, we’ll be sitting observing the ballot counters all day in SD county to ensure there are no shenanigans. our race in particular is going to be down to the wire, and might not be decided until every mail ballot is counted. A lot of campaigns do this, so don’t freak out if there are reps there from local or national campaigns.

If I hadn’t gotten this job, I would have signed up to be a poll worker.

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Training Day!

So imagine 20 pc workstations (with large portrait monitors) in the corner of a big room that also contains a bunch of high-speed counting machines. Four rows of five. Each station seats a team of two judges and is separated by a plastic barrier. Unfortunately pretty close proximity in both directions.

The software is actually pretty impressive. I had imagined we would be looking at real ballots, but there’s a program that just pulls images of ballots from an adjudication queue. It comes in with an overlay that includes red boxes around contests that were flagged for some reason, green areas for votes that were counted, yellow areas for stray marks that were not counted but maybe should be looked at, etc. The overlay can be toggled on and off.

All actions (votes added, votes removed, write-ins, etc.) get logged on paper by the team and that list of actions is reconciled at the end of the day with the actions that the mainframe logged from that workstation.

So today’s training was basically: temperature check on the way in, some HR paperwork, orientation (bathrooms, break room, lunch time, etc.), a classroom lecture where we are shown many examples of typical adjudication actions and how they are logged, and finally a hands-on session where we walk through the same examples to practice using the software and logging.

My main takeaway from the training is that we are going to amazing lengths to try like hell to give people the votes they intended. Most people are probably very careful with their ballots, assuming that stray marks or crossouts or whatever are going to cause problems and maybe spoil your whole ballot.

But some people apparently just circle the names of candidates, or circle the bubbles without filling them in. These ballots get flagged for adjudication because they are perceived to be blank. Then, assuming the intent is clear and consistent, the poor judges have to mark and log a vote for every single contest. Some people apparently also vote for candidates and then also write in all their names. So all those write-ins have to be cleaned up.

Demographics: Probably 2/3 senior citizens, overwhelmingly white. About what I expected.

In summary, I’m pretty sure that people will go insane just looking at these endless ballots on screens for days/weeks on end.

Ironically, it was successful at taking my mind off all the election bullshit, but I’m never going to be able to keep up with all the UP threads I try and follow. SMH

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Unfortunately I am prohibited from describing anything that occurs in the BTC in detail, but it wouldn’t be very interesting anyway. The local paper published a series of photos online related to the election and early voting including this one that shows some of the adjudication boards at work (thankfully I am not in the photo):

btc

At the risk of violating my oath, I will disclose that the best ballot I saw yesterday had the same thing in every single write-in field:

WU TANG

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UPDATE: The counting continues. It is day 12. I have been there 8-10 hours every day and will probably continue to be for the next two weeks. Staying so busy is great for my mental health as I’m not really able to keep up with anything going on in the outside world.

They hired a bunch of new temps several days ago so Adjudication could move to two shifts in order to keep the workstations busy processing ballots for more hours every day.

I found out they have webcams running in the various elections departments so the public can share in the excitement. So you may just catch a glimpse of me on the feed if you check the “BTC North” camera during the day shift:

https://recorder.maricopa.gov/multimedia/btcgallery.aspx

Today’s write-ins for President included “Harambe Gorilla” and “Dr. Fauci”. Either would be a fine choice.

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(I had a post in the main election thread several days ago that I will include here for completeness)

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That’s all great and all but tell us how many Biden/Harris vans you saw dropping off 1,000,000 ballots cast by dead cats and dogs that went 100/0 for Biden and left the Senate races inexplicably blank.

Seriously, though, thanks for the hard work!

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So today was my last shift. There is still a couple of days of random stuff, mostly having to do with provisional ballots and duplication (a tedious process that involves electronically transferring marks from a damaged ballot to a fresh one that can be printed and run through the tabulator). But it seems like most of the temps are done and things are winding down.

I’ll probably have a couple of additional posts with some details but at this point I’m just tired and looking forward to catching up on a bunch of normal life stuff that’s been set aside. I ended up doing 20 days in a row, then a day off this past Sunday, and finally Monday and Tuesday of this week.

The protesters are still there but dwindling every day. There were maybe 40 people there when I left mid-afternoon today. I sort of have to walk through the protest zone on my way to the overflow parking lot, and obviously I’m still wearing my mask until I get to my car. Yesterday some dumbass called out as I was passing, “Uh, the coronavirus is FAKE and GAY, just so you know, SIR.” I was mildly tempted, but I just kept walking. Shouting match + unmasked nutjob + probably armed = BAD.

One thing I’ll mention is about the computer setup which I thought was interesting. You can see in the photo above a secure glass room in the back that has a single rack of servers. All the workstations in the room, including the ones integrated into the tabulation machines are connected to this rack on a completely isolated internal network. You can also see that groups of cables come out of the server room and rest on these wire trays that run throughout the room. The point is that except for power, there are no cables that leave the room - nothing through the walls or ceiling. And because the wire trays are pretty much transparent, you could literally follow every wire in the system and see where it start and ends.

Maybe I’ll also make a list of the best write-ins I saw…definitely some good ones!

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LOL, there were two funny conspiracy theories (not including the one lawsuit that’s still active). First was “SharpieGate” which you’ve probably heard of. The second started when somebody saw media people unloading camera equipment from a media vehicle in clear view of the protesters and claimed they were sneaking in ballots. This was probably covered in the election thread:

https://twitter.com/GadiNBC/status/1324806864601640960

My dudes, this facility is connected to a giant warehouse with like 6 loading bays. The fake ballots are being delivered back there!

Also, I probably laid eyes on 10K ballots during the past 3 weeks. The number I saw that voted only the presidential contest was 0.

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Thanks for your work and for reporting it here.

I’m glad you weren’t harmed by any of the crazies.

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Some final thoughts, in no particular order.

1… It’s pretty clear that nobody had any idea how many total ballots would be cast, even on election day when we had been counting for 2 weeks. I get the impression that the expectation was somewhere around 1.7 to 1.8M, with 2.1M as the absolute upper limit. As it turned out, I think we’ll come in right around 2.1M, with about 80% turnout.

2… My initial read on demographics from my training group was a little off. It turned out that there was a lot of diversity across all areas: age, race, socio-economic status, etc. While many of the temps were retirees, there were also many younger working-class people who were there primarily for the wages. I met several who had recently been working in retail or amazon warehouse-type jobs.

3… While the vast majority of decisions made by adjudication judges are trivial and obvious, there are still some edge cases that are subjective judgement calls. Different judges will come to different decisions, which means that if we ran all the ballots through adjudication again, we would get slightly different results.

The judges work in teams of 2, one D and one R. All changes must be agreed on. In the event of a dispute, a floating independent “Inspector” is used as a tie-breaker. But that’s really just another person trying to make a good-faith best guess at the voter’s intent.

4… I was surprised to see basically no evidence of partisan advocacy. In other words, a Democrat pushing hard to find a way for Biden to get a questionable vote, or vice versa. Part of it was probably people knowing that their work is being monitored and audited and has to be defensible. But a lot of it was also that people were taking the job seriously and trying to act in good faith. Also, most people probably just don’t care that much about politics.

5… One of the most surprising phenomena to me was the prevalence of what I called the “redundant write-in” ballot. This is a ballot that has a proper vote in every contest, and also a write-in vote for the same candidate. E.g., fill in the bubble for Mark Kelly in the Senate race and also fill in the write-in bubble and write “Mark Kelly”. The problem is that each write-in line has the words “Write In Candidate” and many people apparently think that is an instruction for them so they do it. And once they start doing it, they usually do it for the entire ballot. In a way, I have a lot of respect for these voters because they are willing to go to a tremendous amount of extra work to cast their votes. But it is a huge pain in the ass for the judges. The computer flags every contest as an overvote, and all the write-in votes have to be manually removed so that the intended votes will count. I think every pair of judges saw a ballot like this at least 5 times per day.

6… Presidential overvotes. We had several qualified write-in candidates for President (including Howie Hawkins and Gloria La Riva), but only 3 candidates made the ballot: Trump, Biden, and Jorgensen, in that order.

pres

From the first day, I think most judges saw more overvotes in this contest than we would have expected. And of the people who filled in two bubbles, it was probably 75% Biden/Jorgensen, 24% Trump/Jorgensen, and 1% Trump/Biden. I haven’t heard a good theory for why people would do this. The AZ ballot prints the names of the 11 electors for each candidate in tiny print, so this section of the ballot is very busy and potentially confusing. And it seems likely that Biden being next to Jorgensen probably explains why more Biden voters than Trump voters seemed to screw this up.

7… Write-ins. To all the Bernie Bros in AZ who wrote in Bernie for president (and there were a LOT of you), I get it. I really do. But seriously, you could have blown the whole thing. That also goes for the Yang Gangsters, the Tulsi-heads, and everybody else who threw their vote away.

8… I think my COVID risk was probably about 3x higher than I had been hoping. Mask compliance was pretty good, workstations were wiped down and sprayed between shifts, and hand sanitizer was ubiquitous. Daily temperature checks for everybody entering the building. But distancing was just impossible and you end up with your head next to at least one other person, and usually many more, all day in a somewhat closed space. I’m happy to be back in my bubble and as far as I know we all dodged that bullet.

9… I met a lot of nice people and I’m glad I did it. It was even more interesting that I had hoped it would be. Everybody in the room got along fine, Red and Blue working together in perfect harmony. :-) Everybody talked about the weather and the ballots and kids and pets and everything else but politics. In that way it was pretty amazing.

If you have the opportunity to participate in a future election, I recommend it. I think everybody involved learned a lot about the election process and increased their confidence that our elections are generally well-run, secure, and fair.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and I leave you with a list of actual write-ins for President that I either saw with my own eyes or heard about.

Write-Ins for President

Mark Cuban
Ross Perot
Ron Paul
Turd Furgeson
Ted Cruz
Andrew Cuomo
Wu Tang
Sen. Ben Sasse
Jack Hoff
Don Blankenship
Peyton Manning
Saucy Nugs
Who is John Galt?
Kermit the Frog
Pedro
Duane “The Rock” Johnson
John Kasich
The Asteroid
Nikki Haley
God Almighty / Jesus Christ
Harambe Gorilla
Ronald Reagan
Shamu the Orca
Keanu Reeves
None of the Above
Jason Momoa
Dana Perino
Pete Buttigieg
Snake Pliskin
Dr. Fauci
Condaleeza Rice
Edward Van Halen
Navy Seal Jocko Willink
Ted Nugent
John McCain
Master Chief
Elon Musk
Jess Ventura
Tulsi Gabbard
Kanye West
Donald Duck
Mitt Romney
Stephen Colbert / Seth Meyers
Amy Klobuchar
Mike Pence
Andrew Yang
Deez Nuts
Mickey Mouse
Benie Sanders
Vermin Supreme
Deep State :)

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Are you sure that was intended as a write-in vote and not an exclamatory reaction to the available candidates?

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