So, like an eager fool, I volunteered to help man the polls for the special election here in California's 50th District. It was a first time thing for me and I would like to offer the reader some of the observations I made as well as generate some discussion on why the Republican election apparatus appears so much more effective than our Democratic version. Look below the fold for a couple of tidbits.....
I volunteered for a couple of reasons: I'm convinced post-Ohio 2004, that the potential for manipulating elections at the individual precinct level is huge and I wanted to be there to observe and/or stop any malfeasance. Secondly, I wanted to understand the system from the bottom up and work my way through the system over the next couple of years to affect change - I personally believe in the Keep It Simple approach to voting...big transparent locked plexiglass box with voters putting in there hand signed paper ballots, then everybody counts the votes in the end.
I want to first mention the poor organization of the Election's Board in setting up our precinct. Not a single one of us four volunteers had ever done this before and the information provided to us was wholly insufficient for the task at hand. So we plodded along and after a few mistakes (we think we entered some unsigned absentee ballots as well as some incomplete provisional ballots) we figured it out and were up and running. Just as our confidence was established, straight into the driveway pulls a Jaguar containing the " district trouble-shooter", who instantly declares we are all "newbies" and that this is a disaster. We say we think we have it under control and we start getting nitpicked for not having the sign-in table organized according to some diagram buried in one of the DMV-esque guides provided to the poor schlub who is our precinct manager (he was practically hyper-ventilating the whole day). I'm not one to tolerate BS, so I flatly say, "either help us, or leave, but don't just hang out to tell us what a poor job us first time volunteers are doing." She was one condescending bitch and I got into it with her good later on after the polls closed, but this not about that....
Electronic Voting: So California now has the Diebold Electronic Voting Machines, but ours are slightly different. They print a paper trail that the voter can use to verify that their votes were correctly recorded. They are prompted to view the data three times before actually casting their ballot. It seemed to behave pretty well on the individual poll basis, but we hit some glitches when it came to closing time. There is a master machine that you use to generate voter cards for each satellite machine that the voters use. When it came time to go through the shutdown sequence, the software on the main machine froze up and it never printed the verification output. So we just had to box it up and hope for the best...did we end up invalidating all the voters who used the electronic machines?
Party Affiliation: This June's special election had all this weird primary election stuff and had different potential ballots depending on your party. So we actually had to verbally verify what the person's party affiliation was. I personally found that to be really discomforting. You could see people stink-eyeing each other, or husband and wives who were unknowingly registered for different parties realizing it for the first time. We also found a few Dems registered as Repubs unbeknownst to them. It was really uncomfortable and I think it somehow violates the spirit of voter confidentiality.
Republican Organization: The thing that caught my attention was the San Diego Republican Party guy who hovered around the poll, bugging to update the voter registration list sign-off so he could call Repubs who didn't turn out. This wormy little guy just got under my skin and I couldn't say a damn thing. What really pisses me off is that I know he actually was able to convince more Repubs to turn out. I could overhear his phone calls and would recognize the names that he called as they signed in, and they were rarely alone, but mostly husband and wife. Why Busby didn't have a similar mechanism in place is beyond me.
Well, that's it for now, although I could write far more about the fun myself and the other clerk had playing guess the party affiliation as the people pulled up.....it's scary that there is so much truth in sterotypes....