Election Judge Report, 2020 Primaries

[tskirvin]

Yesterday I worked as an Election Judge for the 2020 Primary Elections in DuPage County. This was my third turn as a judge, all of them at the same polling place in West Chicago.

This election was significantly different than my previous rounds simply because it happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. We're a few days into the push for "social distancing", where essentially everybody is strongly encouraged/required to stay home and not go out in public. This is not very conducive to running a proper election; not only is the electorate much less willing to go out and vote, but the Judges that run the whole thing are generally the people most vulnerable to the disease. We might technically have postponed the election, at the cost of doing some damage to our democracy as a whole (and will there be a better time any time soon?), but the state chose to go forward. And so, even though I was particularly comfortable with it, I went forward and did my job.

The mess started for me the night before. I got a call from one of my judges, begging me in so many words to tell him that it was okay to not make it because he had no insurance and had pre-existing conditions that put him at significant risk. I wasn't enough of a good manager to tell him to stay home, but I told him that it was up to him to make the decision for him and his family; that's all I felt I could do. Another student called off at the last minute, and another worker texted off. It wasn't great, but I still ended up having a total of seven judges - three long-term veterans, three students, and myself. It was enough, but it was a little bit tight.

We got as much cleaning equipment as the Election Division was able to get a hold of at the last minute, and honestly they did a pretty good job. It was delivered by the Department of Transportation first thing in the morning, indicating that they had successfully coordinated a multi-department field operation in just a few days - not bad! They had mixed the hand sanitizer and the cleaning fluid on their own, and put them in dollar-store squirt bottles and IKEA soap dispensers. It absolutely felt like the best that could be done with limited time and stretched supply lines. We did not get enough rubber gloves, and I strongly suspect that they scrambled to get the ones we did get. We had enough the night before to have one pair per judge, and that was it. I managed to find a few gloves around the house for myself, and so did most of the other judges. But that's what we had. We had to improvise on how to lay out the voting booths, because the plan had been written before the six-foot-distance guideline had been set; we at least managed to get ~4-5 feet between the booths.

We had two new technologies this time, because the previous technologies had aged out and the County Board had been forced to give the Clerk the money to buy replacements. The first was simply a new cell phone; the old ones simply didn't function anymore, and the new ones were solid USB-C flip phones, nothing to write home about but amusing. Second were the PollPads: iPads with appropriate software for running a polling place. The software was slick and fairly effective, with the significant change being that the voters signed directly on the iPad instead of on a sticker. It reduced paper usage, it let us eliminate another old piece of tech (the thing that printed up the voter cards for use with the touchscreen), and it really did speed things up. The major difficulty is that the signatures on the iPads were, well, signatures on iPads - not as high res as paper and more difficult to do signature comparisons.

We spent a lot of the day wiping down the booths and the shared equipment (booths, pens, styluses). It wasn't great that we were all touching the same iPads over and over again - this was the possible disease vector, and we didn't really have better solution. We also didn't really have enough manpower to keep everything stationed and cleaned, so we only hooked up 3/4 PollPads and had to keep our breaks short. The rest of the building was more "off-limits" than usual, with the school outright closed and even non-essential staff limited. I saw two teachers, two custodians, and a few cleaners.

The election day was never particularly slow. We had 422 voters over the day; it was never empty for more than a few minutes at a time, and we never had a line of more than ~3 people queued up at our three check-in stations. Only once did anybody have to wait for a voting booth, and then for only a few minutes.

There were only a few really-cranky voters. Some of these were of the "how dare you make me take a partisan ballot!!11!" style, where they were upset to be participating in a partisan primary. The others were upset about their voter registration having issues, which was a bit of a problem, but we were able to work it out consistently. We never had to turn anybody away except because a) they were in the wrong polling place or b) they came late.

We did have two, err, interesting cases where a voter came and found that they had already voted. In both cases we had the same problem: the voter's spouse had voted for them accidentally. The address matched, the name close-enough-to-matched (and in one case the recorded name was just initials), the signatures at least partially matched on the iPad, and the voter didn't notice the confusion when they signed. So, yeah. Not good. In both cases both voters did get to vote and it all worked out okay, but tech support was quite helpful to make sure it happened.

At the end of the day, we managed to get out of there in about an hour. The Clerk had changed the responsibilities around a bit, so that the work was a bit better divvied up; I think that this worked pretty well. The biggest time cost was for the ballot scanner machine to print off four copies of the results; that thing is a tank, but it's slow, and it had to be done serially and only after the last voter had dropped in his ballot. But we got everything packed up, I drove over with another judge to the courthouse, dropped everything off, and got the other judge back to the polling place and his car so he could go home. I was back by 8:45 or so, just, err, around 16 hours after I left.

So. Good day. I'm still tired.