Off off-year election

Tuesday I worked part of the day on the election.  Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Bigfork and Whitefish held elections. All but Columbia Falls held mail-in elections.

The County administered the elections.  A couple dozen of us had the job to open the mail-in ballots.  This was the first time I did this type of election job.

A team of three to four people were at each table.  One person opened the mail-in return envelope with the voter's signature.  He/she handed this envelope to the second person who took the secrecy envelope out of the mail-in envelope and handed the secrecy envelope to the third person who opened that envelope and took out the folded ballot and handed the ballot to the fourth person who unfolded the ballot and placed it on a stack of ballots.

This sounds simple minded but part of the purpose was to separate the envelope with the voter's signature from the ballot to ensure confidentiality.

Prior to us getting the envelope, the election department had verified the voter's signature to ensure the returned ballot's validity.

My job was to open the mail-in envelope.  And I filled out the paperwork for each bundle of 25 as I was the first to complete my task.  Sometimes I helped unfold the ballots to get them flat and more easily read by the computer.

We worked on bundles of 25 ballots at a time.  Once 25 ballots were opened and stacked, we counted the mail-in signature envelopes and the secrecy envelopes to make sure we had 25.  Another election official gathered our 25 ballots and envelopes.  She counted the ballots to make sure she had the correct amount before the ballots were fed by another person into the voting machine to be counted.  That is why it was important for the person unfolding the ballot to do it in such a way as have the ballot lie flat for easy feeding into the voting machine.

There were exceptions to 25 in a bundle.  Sometimes the returned envelope was invalid for some reason.   I didn't work that part so I don't know the reasons an envelope and its ballot could be rejected.  But a few of our bundles only had 24 envelopes in them.

I was one of the younger people working the election.  I think the average age was in the mid-60s, if not higher.

I worked in a table of four with three other women, Tammy, Fran and Bobbie.  One woman said she was 41.  Another woman said she had a 60 year old son.  The third woman looked to be in her 70s at least.  None of us had worked before at opening ballots.  The 41 year old and I had worked as chief judges in the past.  The other two ladies had worked many previous elections.

We all got along well and chatted the time away which made a boring job go faster.  The ladies all had led interesting lives.

The election department had lunch catered for us as we were sequestered once the opening of ballots started.

I believe that countywide over 10,000 ballots were mailed out and a little over 3,000 ballots were returned.

Whitefish had a contentious election with a clear divide between conservative and liberal candidates.  Around 53% of the Whitefish ballots had been returned vs. a countywide return rate of over 30%.

Voters had until 8 pm to return their ballot, but after the mail was delivered the only way a voter could return their ballot was to hand deliver it to the courthouse election department.    As a result most of us workers ran out of envelopes to open after 3 pm.    My table ended our work at 3:30 pm.  We had started at 10 am.

Everything ran smoothly and I was impressed at how the County election department ran the process.