I had a wonderful experience working the polls. Everyone was friendly and I even got a chill when I took the Election Day Oath :-) I think everyone should do this at least once in their lifetime. It really gives you a new perspective on elections. I think we sometimes view the elections from our tiny little piece of the world in the blogosphere and in that, we sometimes lose focus on the big picture. That being said, one of the reasons I volunteered was to moniter the election for signs of voter intimidation, fraud etc. Below are my findings.
Voter Suppression/Disenfranchisement It turns out that a couple of months I was notified that my voting location had changed and I received a new registration card in the mail with the new location. However, when working yesterday, many of the voters said they never received a notice on the change of location and the new location was hard to find and parking was not easy. My precinct could probably be described as lower middle class. There are several ethnicities including African Americans, Hispanic, Asian and Muslims residing in my precinct. I don't know if I would classify this as voter suppression, but I do think that we probably would have had a better turnout if the change of location had been better communicated. (Turn out was much better than expected by the way)
Voter Fraud When the polls opened, there was a man standing right outside the entrance of the voter location handing out fliers that listed all the Republican candidates on it. The problem was, the fact that these were only Republican candidates was in very tiny font at the bottom of the flier, so the less observant voter would think they were the ONLY candidates on the ballot. I told my precinct captain and she forced the man to move 50 feet away from the entrance which is the law in NC. I think there should be a law prohibiting ANY campaigning at the polls.
Electronic Voting Our precinct used the ES&S iVotronic machines. When the polls first opened, only 3 of the 5 machines were functional, but within about an hour, 2 election officials showed up and got them up and running. There were some minor glitches with the paper spools (thank God we had paper) but again the election officials were back out and fixed the problems. All the workers were extremely well trained on the machines.
These are the only somewhat negative things I have to report. Everything else went smoothly. One thing I did notice by listening to people talking in line was that there were LOTS of registered Republicans saying that the country needs a change and that's why they came out. I think all the rhetoric about the Republican turnout not being as great as expected is BS. I think they turned out all right, they just didn't vote Republican!
I'd love to hear from others out there who volunteered yesterday and what your experiences were.
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