Member-only story
I Worked the Polls on Tuesday
Nothing strange or untoward happened
I’m not patting myself on the back, but I DID work the polls this past Tuesday. I had never volunteered to do so before, but given the harassment, taunting, and threatening gestures toward poll workers in the recent months, I felt like someone with thick, white skin needed to step up and put themselves into the democratic fray.
In our particular precinct, we had over 1100 voters come to the polls, many bringing their small children with them. They were waiting in line at seven, and they waited patiently as it took us a few extra minutes to discover that the ballots themselves were stored in the scanner’s cabinet. That was a stressful few moments, akin to a restaurant discovering that their food supply hadn’t arrived in time for the night shift.
We had twelve people working the polls — all energetic, pleasant, and ready to help in whatever democratic way they could.
I started at the Resolution desk, which I know could have been the most conflictual setting in that school cafeteria. Mainly, though, the twenty or so people who came to the desk that day had simply changed addresses in the past couple of months, and our county hadn’t quite caught up to the change. So they voted “provisionally,” seemed content enough to do so, and thanked all of us for our…