A lot of people have gotten pretty excited about the election challengers in some states this election. Well, I was a an "election challenger" for the Kerry campaign in MI. If you gave a challenger a hard time - don't get too excited if you don't know for sure who they were with. It could have been me! Please read my story below.
Things I could do:
- Stand or sit behind the voting table and look at the book as they wrote down the names of voters. I could ask them to turn back to other pages so I can get names I missed so long as I didn't create a holdup.
- Challenge voters for legitimate reasons (but it was our policy to challenge NO voters even though it was within our authority).
- Observe the election process and get certain information from poll workers.
Things I could not do:
- Touch the voter rolls, voting machines, or espescially ballots.
- Do any sort of campaigning, wear any Kerry or Democratic gear or mention who I was with within earshot of voters.
- Harrass or intimidate anyone.
- Do anything that would cause an unneccessary slowdown.
Things I was supposed to do for the campaign:
- Get the serial numbers for the voting machines, make sure they started at zero in the morning, get the total number of votes at the end of the day. The machines at my location and in most of Michigan are the very good optical scan machines.
- I had to wear a big sticker that said "Election Challenger" on it.
- Democratic workers also wore little, non-descript silver lapel pins so we could identify other Kerry workers in places where we couldn't wear campaign gear.
- Watch the names as they get written down and check them off on my own list that I was given that was voters they had contacted. Canvassers would go over the list to find out who they still needed to get out to vote later in the day.
- Inform voters of their rights if they need such information, assist them with things like finding poll locations, etc.
- Do not challenge any voters.
- Call for assisstance if any other challengers did challenge voters (never happened - they were hardly even there most of the time).
- Endure dirty looks and questions from voters.
- Chide the election workers if I saw something problematic going on (never happened).
Basically, if anybody asked "So, what is an election challenger?" or "What do you do here?", I would say "I'm just here to observe and make sure everything goes smoothly. I'm not going to be challenging any voters or harrasing anybody." If somebody asked who I was with, I would say "By law, I can't tell you, because that would be considered campaigning or intimidation. But don't worry - I'm just here to make sure that everybody gets to vote and to observe the integrity of the process." I got asked both those questions several times and endured a number of dirty looks.
For the most part, though, my experience was positive. The election workers were outstanding and ran a tight ship. Everybody was really friendly, and nobody got in anyone's way. The other party just stopped in now and then at our location, didn't really do much of anthing. The impression I got from election workers was that it was easily record turn-out in terms of percentage of registered voters. They also gave us a peek at the results at the end, and they gave the impression that the results for Democrats were much better than usual for these districts (the area skews somewhat Republican because of a lot of Reagan Democrats.)
There were a few people who were at the wrong polling location, so either I, another challenger or an election worker would direct them to the correct location. Most didn't have to go far, so they all promised to make it and go vote. There were a few people not on the books because they either registered too late or didn't seem to be registered at all. They got provisional ballots, but they probably won't count. At least one person was registered according to city hall but didn't appear on the books (they always made sure to check everything possible before resorting to provisional ballots). They got a regular ballot and their vote counted.