![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Election Judge Report, Apr 2021
Election Judge Final Report - I worked another election judge shift for the 2021 Consolidated Municipal Elections in Illinois yesterday. This was an election for city councils, school boards, park boards, mayors, Township officials, etc; in my case there were 26 positions and 51 candidates (including write-ins).
I ended up being in charge of:
- The touchscreen voting machine (assembly and disassembly)
- The optical ballot scanner (assembly and disassembly and debugging)
- Wiring everything together
- Answering the phone (~50%)
- Tech support
- All things that involved lifting
- Getting paperwork ready to go
- Dealing with the election division + site rep
- Trying (and failing) to delegate work
- New judge mentoring
- A whole lot of the practical cleanup work
This was a lot, and it also didn't _look_ much like work to the voters. This is a stressful combination! I spent a lot of the time minute-by-minute doing laps around the school or reading, but I was fairly stressed for most of it, and about half the time when I came back from one of these laps there was a fire to put out.
Most of the real-actual-emergency fires involved the optical ballot scanner, which was flaky and required multiple calls to tech support to work out. Three times we had to have voters put their ballots in the emergency ballot slot for a while, to be loaded into the ballot box properly only when we had fixed the equipment. We ended up replacing it entirely, which I was mildly surprised actually worked.
For the rest of it, I did my best to just try to let it go when weird decisions were being made. One judge _really_ didn't want me to change how she'd organized the paperwork, even though she wasn't in charge of it and I was laying things out to speed up our eventual cleanup. When the other judges got it in their heads to start tearing down signs from the wall 1.5 hours before the polls closed, I pushed back for a bit, then I just got out of the way. Nobody wanted to switch jobs, and it wasn't my problem to fix, so I let it go. We had one straight-up yelling match when a voter came in and said they hadn't brought their main-in ballot with them, and every judge offered a different position. It was taxing.
But, of course, the day eventually ended. We even had an exciting change this time: a court order came in at the last minute mandating that we should _not_ share the election results with poll-watchers or on the windows of the facility (which is normally standard practice), which could shave up to 30-40 minutes off of our tear-down time (honestly, tear-down is mostly bound by how slow the dot matrix printer is in the optical scanner). But then the last voter simply wouldn't leave. He sat there staring at his ballot for about half an hour! We cleaned up everything around him, me sweating profusely by the end of it, and he didn't notice. Eventually one of the other judges said "sir, you can't look at your phone here", and he suddenly looked up, then finished his ballot in a couple of minutes. He dropped it in the ballot box, and we could finish tear-down over the next ~30 minutes (should have been less, but that's where the inability to work ahead on paperwork got us...)
My big lesson of the day is that I am eligible to be a Field Rep instead of an Election Judge proper, and I may well do that. This would basically be a roving tech support judge, checking in on a bunch of different polling places, keeping track of voter counts, and just generally _helping_ rather than running the place or being run. I think it'd suit me.
I ended up being in charge of:
- The touchscreen voting machine (assembly and disassembly)
- The optical ballot scanner (assembly and disassembly and debugging)
- Wiring everything together
- Answering the phone (~50%)
- Tech support
- All things that involved lifting
- Getting paperwork ready to go
- Dealing with the election division + site rep
- Trying (and failing) to delegate work
- New judge mentoring
- A whole lot of the practical cleanup work
This was a lot, and it also didn't _look_ much like work to the voters. This is a stressful combination! I spent a lot of the time minute-by-minute doing laps around the school or reading, but I was fairly stressed for most of it, and about half the time when I came back from one of these laps there was a fire to put out.
Most of the real-actual-emergency fires involved the optical ballot scanner, which was flaky and required multiple calls to tech support to work out. Three times we had to have voters put their ballots in the emergency ballot slot for a while, to be loaded into the ballot box properly only when we had fixed the equipment. We ended up replacing it entirely, which I was mildly surprised actually worked.
For the rest of it, I did my best to just try to let it go when weird decisions were being made. One judge _really_ didn't want me to change how she'd organized the paperwork, even though she wasn't in charge of it and I was laying things out to speed up our eventual cleanup. When the other judges got it in their heads to start tearing down signs from the wall 1.5 hours before the polls closed, I pushed back for a bit, then I just got out of the way. Nobody wanted to switch jobs, and it wasn't my problem to fix, so I let it go. We had one straight-up yelling match when a voter came in and said they hadn't brought their main-in ballot with them, and every judge offered a different position. It was taxing.
But, of course, the day eventually ended. We even had an exciting change this time: a court order came in at the last minute mandating that we should _not_ share the election results with poll-watchers or on the windows of the facility (which is normally standard practice), which could shave up to 30-40 minutes off of our tear-down time (honestly, tear-down is mostly bound by how slow the dot matrix printer is in the optical scanner). But then the last voter simply wouldn't leave. He sat there staring at his ballot for about half an hour! We cleaned up everything around him, me sweating profusely by the end of it, and he didn't notice. Eventually one of the other judges said "sir, you can't look at your phone here", and he suddenly looked up, then finished his ballot in a couple of minutes. He dropped it in the ballot box, and we could finish tear-down over the next ~30 minutes (should have been less, but that's where the inability to work ahead on paperwork got us...)
My big lesson of the day is that I am eligible to be a Field Rep instead of an Election Judge proper, and I may well do that. This would basically be a roving tech support judge, checking in on a bunch of different polling places, keeping track of voter counts, and just generally _helping_ rather than running the place or being run. I think it'd suit me.