Voting in Florida

Charlotte County Office of Elections hires and trains folks to be the poll workers for elections. I signed up two and a half years ago and have worked five elections, including this general election.

Sometimes it has been real fun. As I've posted in the past, working the polls is almost more like attending a family reunion because many workers and voters are old friends and neighbors. The workers often bring food so that we have a continuous "buffet" (more like a snack bar). And I hear some stuff that's pretty funny.

Valerie, who sat with me at the ballot table, told me that next week, there will be people in the streets, the government and all the banks will be closed down, there will be armed soldiers marching in the major cities, there would be demonstrations . . . or whatever else people do on Veterans day. - She had me worried for a moment there!

She had a tiny bit of history that I had not heard before. Margaret Truman got fed up with hearing her father, President Harry Truman, constantly using the phrase "cow manure" in his speeches about the politics of the day. Her mother Bess responded, "You don't begin to realize how hard it was for me to get him to say that instead of what he wanted to say!"

We had fun with a very simple thing. There were two people checking the voters in. They were at the first table. Valerie and I were at the next table to hand out the ballots as each voter brought us a "signature slip." The ones checking the voters in said, "Take this to the next table." However, our two tables had one long table cloth covering both so the voters invariably were looking for the "next" table somewhere else in the room. We had to wave our hands or yell we were the next table as they wandered by. That usually brought a smile because of the silliness of how we were handling it. It didn't hold anyone up, really, and it seemed to add a cheery note to what was going on.

Sometimes I was awed. In our precinct which still had about 400 eligible voters (we had about that many who already voted early or by absentee ballot), we had five people on crutches and two who obviously limped and should have been on crutches who came in to vote. We had some very elderly who barely tottered on their own who came to vote. We had whole families (one had six children on tow) there. We had people who had changes of address or anomolies in the registrar of voters records who patiently waited for as much as an hour while the precinct clerk sat on the phone trying to clear up the snags. Somehow, we seemed able to reconcile the problems and only one person left in a huff out of the 250 who passed our way.

Tom was awesome. In his seventies, he took the voters with their ballots to the booths with a friendly word or two. But he often took it upon himself to talk to the children who were waiting while their parents voted. Because one parent took a lot of time to read the amendments carefully before voting on them, Tom ended up staying engaged with two grade school boys for twenty five minutes. That was amazing!

Sometimes I was scared. This was the third location in three years for our precinct's poll. On top of that, the address given for this site is for a different building on the corner and a security fence keeps people from getting to our poll from that side of the school where we are located. Next time, I am planning to have a friend stand at that corner to give folks directions to our polling place.

In addition, we have no idea what is on the chips in the machines which counted the paper ballots. A ten percent flipping of votes built into the main chip could not be subjected to legal challenge since that chip's makeup is considered by the courts to be "proprietary." It happens that the totals of our vote gave the precinct to Sen. McCain by ten percent. From personal experience, I know the current supervisor of elections is a nice man who trains us to help voters have a good experience, though I do not know if he is partisan enough to be willing to go along with rigged machines. And now a new supervisor from the same party has been elected and I know nothing about him.

My experiennce, as you can see, is that there are so many points of interest in developing a voting process and then carrying it out, I am glad to be a small part of it.

But I will be even gladder when Congress revises election processes to remove the legal impediments to finding out if the critical computer chips are skewed and to remove the elections offices from partisan hands.

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Update: Just for the record, when I compare the voting patterns in our precinct from pevious elections, we had many more Hispanics (I'd guess about ten times as many) as before. All of them looked professional and were bilingual. We had fewer African Americans than any previous election even though we had more than twice the turn out (we had maybe eight or so at previous elections but only about five this time - I'm told the precinct has practically no African Americans in it). We had 121 voters in the September primary and 247 voters Tuesday. We had ten privacy booths for voters to use to fill out their ballots and two scanners to count their votes. We had only two ballots clog in one machine but which cleared easily once we found how to get at them. There were no lines that lasted more than a few minutes except when we opened at 7 am. They were all through by about 7:20. Voting was pretty steady all day. We were able to take breaks for rest stops and snacks and stretching legs without holding up any voters.

In another post I will talk about the specifics of voting and some miscellaneous stuff that doesn't quite fit in this essay