As a Cog in the Election System: Reflections on My Role as a Precinct Election Official

As a Cog in the Election System: Reflections on My Role as a Precinct Election Official

I may nod off several times in composing this post the day after election day.
Hopefully, in reading it, you won’t.
It is a story about one corner of democracy.
It is a journal entry about how it felt to be a citizen doing what I could do to make other citizens’ voices be heard.
It needed to be written down before the memories and emotions are erased by time and naps.
Yesterday I was a precinct election officer (PEO—a poll worker) for Franklin County—home of Columbus, Ohio.
It was my third election as a PEO.
The first was last November, and the second was the
election aborted by the onset of the coronavirus
in March.
(Not sure that second one counts.)
It was my first as a Voting Location Manager (VLM), so I felt the stakes were high to get it right.
Would there be protests at the polling location?
Would I have to deal with people wearing candidate T-shirts and hats or not wearing masks?
Would there be a crash of election observers, whether official (scrutinizing our every move) or unofficial (that I would have to remove)?
It turns out the answer to all three questions was «no»—and it was a fantastic day of civic engagement by PEOs and voters.
There were well-engineered processes and policies, happy and patient enthusiasm, and good fortune along the way.
This story is going to turn out okay, but it could have been much worse.
Because of the complexity of the election day voting process, last year Franklin County started allowing PEOs to do some early setup on Monday evenings.
The early setup started at 6 o’clock.
I was so anxious to get it right that the day before I took the printout of the polling room dimensions from my VLM packet, scanned it into OmniGraffle on my computer, and designed a to-scale diagram of what I thought the best layout would be.
The real thing only vaguely looked like this, but it got us started.
What I imagined our polling place would look like
We could set up tables, unpack equipment, hang signs, and other tasks that don’t involve turning on machines or breaking open packets of ballots.
One of the early setup tasks was updating the voters’ roster on the electronic poll pads.
As happened around the country, there was
a lot
of early voting activity in Franklin County, so the update file must have been massive.
The electronic poll pads couldn’t handle the update; they hung at step 8-of-9 for over an hour.
I called the Board of Elections and got ahold of someone in the equipment warehouse.
We tried some of the simple troubleshooting steps, and he gave me his cell phone number to call back if it wasn’t resolved.
By 7:30, everything was done except for the poll pad updates, and the other PEOs were wandering around.
I think it was 8 o’clock when I said everyone could go home while the two Voting Location Deputies and I tried to get the poll pads working.
I called the equipment warehouse and we hung out on the phone for hours…re…