Election Day Duties

Well I waited a few days to blog about this, but here I go.
This past Tuesday was pretty awesome. However, for weeks/months leading up to Tuesday I just could not let myself believe that we as a society were going to elect Barack Obama as President of our country.
I spent countless hours this past summer talking to people about the direction of this country and trying to dissuade myself from believing that we would choose hope and promise over fear and terror (and I kept telling myself that maybe this was a battle of 'good versus evil'). So after visiting some friends in Minneapolis I knew that I couldn't sit around on Tuesday, vote and thus just wait for the election results. So I went and volunteered to work for Grand Forks county as an election official (actually I became 'the' election aide runner for the day).


So I woke up early Tuesday morning (I voted early, in fact I had voted the previous Thursday and I even got to skip a part of the line because "yes sir, my address is the same as the one on my driver's license", awesome) and reported to the Grand Forks County Courthouse. I went to meet Debbie, our county Auditor, and she quickly explained my duties for the day ("we tell you to go somewhere with something and then you go there with that", thank you North Dakota simplicity). Debbie and her staff were in high spirits and Debbie immediately left with someone else to get the machine working at one of the sites (North Dakota uses the ballot where you fill in your choice with a black pen {fill in the oval completely} and some people were voting but they could not feed it into the machine and thus their votes had not been counted). So Debbie took off and her aide Maureen got a chair put it next to her desk and told to have a seat, get some coffee and wait (at this point I asked if I could go out and get my book out of the truck and read while I waited and so I went back to the truck and had to decide if it was wise to read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail by Hunter S. Thompson in front of the voting bosses, I choose to read the local paper instead).
I chit-chatted with Maureen and listened as she started to receive the typical call of the day ("Hello Taxes and Finance this Maureen." pause "Where do you live?" pause "Do you know your Township?" pause "Please hold" now yelling into the room "Does anyone know where {address} should vote?" someone yelling back or someone telling Maureen to look on her address sheet, which as the day went on she started to remember that she had one on her desk and the yelling went away, "Hello, you vote {place}" pause "Yes, you should find the polling station there" or "Why yes, there actually is a polling station there." it was awesome).
At approximately 8:34 AM I went off on my first run of the day. In North Dakota you can vote without ID but you need to sign an affidavit that you live where you say you do (the canvassing of the election ends either tomorrow or Tuesday and then the actual election process will be over) and that is what I ran for my first run (comically to my polling station I would have used if I had not early voted).
Grand Forks has 43 polling stations and I visited 22 during the course of the day (items delivered: light bulb, paper clips, affidavits, envelopes, some electrical device, pens, and absentee lists). My favorite part of the day was when I got back from an afternoon run and they had the absentee lists ready for delivery (there was a crew counting both the early voting results and the mail-in votes were being counted in that morning and what they did is enter the names into the computer and then they created lists for district polling inspectors to check to see if people were voting twice). One pile was for the north side of town and the other was the south side. One of the other secretaries was to be the other runner and I told her to pick which side of town she wanted. She said the north side (because her mother was working at one of the stations and she wanted to check on her) and so I went south (I checked my self from doing a 'southside').
In my travels for the day I got to see all the goofball spots the county choose to have as polling stations (I had the process explained to me and I would repeat it, but it got boring and I sort of tuned out). I saw polling stations at all the usual places (grade/middle/high schools, the county transportation building) and at what I thought were unusual choices (the county electrical co-op, many different churches or places of worship {my favorite was the Assembly of God since it was tiny and it was the place where I saw the longest line of the day, eight people}, two hotels/motels {one called the c'mon inn}, and even the shabby mall in town {the one connected to the Kmart and this one was great because while the county runs the election, the city decides who the inspectors are and the person running the station at the mall had never run an election and Debbie was concerned that the person running the station would leave at the end of the day and forget to bring the ballots to the county courthouse and "Shit, we could have the whole darn thing held up and have the ballots sitting there, locked up, with no way to retrieve them until tomorrow."}.
My favorite part of my job was getting my supplies then gently reminding Maureen that I did not know where that place was and so by midday she started remembering to show me where everything was on the official town map (which was located in the copy room). I also got to help set-up rooms for the end of the day count (where everyone came to accumulate all the ballots by station) and would always ask questions like "how much does this machine cost?" or "wow, how late will you be here doing this?" (answers: "a lot" and "I hope we are out of here before midnight", I also got to hear about the last two presidential elections and I forget which year but one of them they were there until three in the morning and had to be back by eight to open the office for normal business the next day, I was told no-one gets vacation during these periods because Maureen told me that while this exciting and fun, she would gladly take vacation if she could, ha ha).
My overall impression of the day was one of normalcy. None of the staff seemed like they did not know what to do or what needed to be done. I was so happy with the process. They let me leave at about 5:30 and Debbie told me I was a great help with the day (my patriotic duty made me feel good).
I went home, had a beer and sat down to watch what I hoped would be history. The misses got home shortly after I did and then she left alone to watch cable news.
An overall awesome feeling overcame me and I fell asleep shortly after midnight.
Maureen promised that if I'm here for the next election that she would see if I could be an inspector and run a polling station (which made me infinitely happy).
Yeah for democracy.