Election - primary

Tuesday I served as chief election judge at my usual precinct.  In the past there were five of us.  The couple decided not to serve this year.  The election department was having trouble finding people to serve.  They found us Bud.  He served with my team one election cycle in 2012.  I thought that being a primary election we could get by with just us four.

Then a week before the election Ted - my most experienced team member - found out that he had to attend a meeting the morning of the election and he couldn't change the date.  He thought he would be back to help us between 2 and 3 pm.  He got his mother to cover for him. Ted is in his 50s to 60s - so his mother is even older.

Then Bud realized his one son was graduating from primary school that day so he wanted to leave at 5 pm so he could attend the graduation ceremony.  "Sure. Your son's graduation only happens once. Go support him."

The election department found me another guy who they hired from a temp job service..  A few days before the election when I called him he had to drop out because he thought the election was on Monday and not on Tuesday.  He worked another job on Tuesday.



I recruited Donna to help cover a few hours if I needed help.

Ted helped me set up the polling place the night before and we did a lot of the work so that the next morning at 6 am my team only had to finish up the work before opening the polls.

At 6 am a woman from the temp job service arrived.  The temp job agency hadn't told me or the election department that they found a replacement worker.  But good that she was here to help.

Ted came back at 2 pm; so from then till Bud left at 5 pm I had one more person than needed as Ted's mother was having a good time and wanted to stay until the end.

With so many people voting via absentee ballot the number of voters who came to the polls was light.  We only had 178 voters - much less than any other election I served at.

The light turnout was helpful in the beginning.  After the voting machine counted the first ballot it froze and would not take any more ballots.    Our poll runner tried to help but she couldn't get the machine to work.  We had a container to hold the ballots after people voted.  A machine company representative came out within the hour.

Of course after he came the machine worked.  We fed the ballots from the container into the machine to be counted.  The representative waited a short time until a voter came to have his ballot counted.  That worked too.  So he left.

After reading 7 more ballots the machine froze again.  This time the election department brought us out a new machine counter.  Fortunately the card retained the already counted ballots so we didn't have to feed them through the machine again.  This new counter worked the rest of the election.

Otherwise the rest of the election went smoothly.

The polls closed at 8 pm. We had the polling place taken down by 9:30 pm.  After taking the ballots, cards, and other stuff back to the election headquarters I was home by 10:15 pm.

It was a long day.