A surfeit of democracy

Yesterday was one of the longest days I’ve put in for some time, and I put it in for less money than I’d ever work for as a normal human being.  But I wasn’t being a normal human, I was being an election judge.

One day week before last, someone posted in a community blog asking for people interested in working as election judges in the September 13th constitutional amendment election to email her.  I did, and found out that new judges are required to attend four hours’ training, to pick up and return the equipment (save the actual voting booths, which are delivered to and picked up from the sites by the county), to set up and tear down, and to conduct the voting for twelve hours straight, all for nine dollars an hour.  (At that I got paid more than my mother did when she was an election worker in the 1960 presidential election.  She earned eight dollars for counting votes from six in the evening until four the next morning.)

I told her I’d do it.  I only worked two days and a bit of a third last week, and that at only ten dollars an hour, so a paycheck for seventeen-plus hours’ more work sounded like a pretty good idea.  She told me to show up Wednesday after work for training, and gave me two or three precincts from which I could pick to work.  I chose Precinct 265, which votes in the parish hall of S. Austin’s Catholic Church on the Drag, across from Dobie Mall.  As reassurance, the coordinator told me that my alternate judge (I was to preside for the precinct) was an old hand, with several elections under his belt, and he’d be able to help me if I got stuck.

Wednesday’s training was, to be blunt, superficial.  There was simply too much material to cover in not nearly enough time.  Not only did we have to cover the basic procedure for logging and instructing the voters and votes, we also had to cover what to do when someone shows up without any ID at all (unless the election judges or clerks can identify them personally, send them home to get their ID).  We learned what to do when the poll register shows that a voter has voted early but the voter himself, standing in front of you, insists he never got the ballot (treat it as what’s called a “challenge vote,” where the judge fills out a form swearing that he challenges the voter’s right to vote today, while the voter fills out another part of the form swearing that he is so allowed to vote legally today, so there).  We found out what kinds of ID are acceptable identification for voting (everything from Sam’s Club cards to pre-printed checks).  Those and a dozen other issues got run past by our trainers at a significant fraction of lightspeed, while with others we were told, “It’s all in the training manual; just read the directions there and you’ll be all right.”

Then the trainers divided us into smaller groups and showed us how to set up the voting booths, which arrive at the polling place with Some Assembly Required.  Travis County uses the Hart InterCivic eSlate electronic voting system, which has to have auxiliary battery packs set up for each unit as well as for the master booth controller and journaler, various legs and feet snapped together, cables connected (both RGB fifteen-pin D-sub connectors and nine-pin RS-232 connectors) and magic incantations mumbled over them.  (Oh, all right . . . we didn’t mumble magic incantations, but we did have to do something very strange with a dead marmoset.)

Setup at the polling site on Friday afternoon included some things we weren’t able to do:  post the “Vote Here” signs on the building (too tempting a target for overnight pilferers or vandals), post the distance markers (same problem).  We accomplished what we could from the checklist and measured off where the distance markers had to go on Saturday, then went home.  We tried to get a phone number from the sexton in case he was late or ran into trouble, but he assured us he’d been working at the church for many years and was always there before six.

Saturday morning the alternate judge, and clerk, and I all showed up before six, which was when we were supposed to begin setting up to open the polls at seven.  And in the naturally perverse way of the universe, the sexton wasn’t there, the doors were locked, and the building dark.  We waited around until six-fifteen, while the alternate judge took the opportunity to give the clerk, who hadn’t worked an election in more than twenty-five years, a tutorial on his duties.

At six-fifteen, when no one had come and the building was still dark, I phoned the election center to notify them so they could try calling the emergency number they are supposed to have ready for every precinct.  Please take note of that “supposed to have.”  In fact they didn’t have anything of the kind.  The woman on the phone at the center told me that there were other precincts having problems with discovering dead eSlate units, needing supplies that somehow hadn’t been distributed as they should have been, being unable to get into voting places, and so on, and that the roving “troubleshooters” were over-stretched—in a word, take a number and get in line.  She advised me that if no one had showed up by six-thirty, we should start setting up to open the polls on the sidewalk at seven, giving the voters paper ballots to vote with, until such time as someone could be found to open the building.  It wasn’t a comforting prospect.

Fortunately, the office’s receptionist did show up at six-thirty, followed shortly after by the sexton, who did have car trouble, as it turned out.  (So much for always-being-there-before-six.)  The three of us started scurrying around, unsealing the voting booths, connecting the eSlate units and the controller, setting out the dozen kinds of forms and flyers we were likely to need, taping up markers and signs (or, in the case of the big “VOTE HERE” sign, propping it on top of a box hedge; the building’s stucco facing was the most un-adhesive material you could have found to try to tape a sign to), rummaging up ballpoint pens (red ink only, please) and #1 drawing pencils from the supply box.  We managed to get through in time to punch the “Open the Polls” button on the controller at 6:59.

And we might as well have saved ourselves the rush.  Our first voter didn’t show up until 7:55.  I had plenty of time to walk up the street to Metro and bring back coffee for myself and hot water for the alternate so he could have tea.  Then the three of us sat around and tried to keep from dying of boredom as crowds of eager voters failed to throw open the doors and clamor to be admitted.  At 9:30, when the clerk posted the first total-number-of-voters-today on the door, three people had voted, and two of them were Paulist Fathers who lived in the rectory upstairs.  I began to feel like the Maytag Repairman.

The Maytag Repairman feeling got worse, because the University of Texas was playing the University of Arkansas yesterday, and crowds of people wearing clothing in that incredibly ugly brownish-rust color known as “Burnt Orange” were walking past on their way to the stadium.  (Texas lost, 38-28, in a game distinguished by their lack of an offensive line.)  Obviously none of these people were likely to start the pre-game festivities with a drop-in at the polls for a quick round of constitutional amendments.  Leaving the alternate and the clerk to entertain one another, I phoned L to come get me, and we went up to our own precinct (137) to vote.

Our precinct had changed voting locations unexpectedly; instead of voting at the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center, they were at the Winters Building, across Lamar and up a few blocks.  Fortunately, I had the sense to check the precinct list before we started, so I knew where to go.  We got to the door to find more depressing news:  their 9:30 number-of-voters posting showed they’d had 33 voters to our three, and there were three people voting when we walked inside.  I’d made myself an aide-memoire to remember how I wanted to vote on each proposition, because the ballot language ranged from opaque to nearly misleading, so we got through quickly and L had me back at my polls in half an hour.

Things finally picked up to a trickle; by mid-afternoon we occasionally had people waiting in line for a minute or two instead of walking up and being served straightaway.  Even so, we were never what anyone would call busy.  We were fortunate in not having any voters who wanted to argue about registration requirements or election rules; the worst we had was a fistful of badly-informed (or sometimes just dim and/or flaky) people who came in with some variation on “I’m registered in Dallas County/Harris County/East Pumpkin County but I just moved here and I want to vote.”  In Texas, you can’t do that.  During early voting, you can vote at any early-voting station in the county where you’re registered, at least, but come Election Day you have to vote in your home precinct.  This meant that about half a dozen people didn’t get to vote at all, and we re-directed another eight or nine to other precincts in the city, wherever they might be registered.  Each redirection required a call to the election-information center, to find out which precinct a particular street address belonged to, because these benighted people also never seemed to have their voter registration cards, which show the precinct in which they’re registered, with them.

Then for some reason the Media decided we ought to be Visited.  First came a photographer from The Daily Texan, who snapped a frame or two of the empty polls but then wandered off to the polling site at Jester Center, four blocks away, in hopes that something more interesting would be going on there.  A little later, a cameraman from KVUE-24 came through and managed to luck into someone casting her ballot, so he could get some tape of something happening.  Then an entire camera crew from KTBC, complete with young mousse-haired reporter, invaded for more than an hour, going outside to do “man-in-the-street” interviews with supporters and opponents of Proposition 12, then coming inside to allow the reporter to stand up like a boiled owl in front of the untenanted voting machines and report that the election turnout was light (which was news to no one at all).

Seven pee em finally came, we closed the doors, let the last few voters finish, broke down and packed the materials, and lugged it downtown to the courthouse for counting.  The courthouse is only ten blocks down the street from the church, so this was no great matter.  We unloaded, got all our forms checked in by the assorted clerks, and got back out before eight, which is quick work.  After that I could finally go home and have my delayed supper, so I did.

At day’s end, fifty people had voted, about 2½ percent of the precinct’s 2,100 registered voters.  Another 22 had voted early, so total Precinct 265 turnout for the election was 3.4 percent.  Had it not been for Proposition 12 (to cap non-economic damage awards—i.e., pain-and-suffering—at $250,000 for EVERY SINGLE CIVIL LAWSUIT in Texas after January 1, 2005), I doubt we would have had nearly as many as we did.  (Statewide turnout was about twelve percent of all registered voters, just under seven percent of the entire populace.)

Jay Leno emanates cladistically from Bug Tussle.  Fnord.