Election judge

I was a chief election judge again this election.  Ted, Terry and Joan came back as election judges.  William did not.  I had left a phone message for him, then when I tried again to call him his phone had been disconnected.  I sent him an email.  No reply.  That is, no reply until 4 pm the day before the election when he called to apologize for not contacting me earlier.  He wanted to work at the election.  I called him back, left a voice mail me on his answering machine but he never returned my call.  So I convinced Donna to be an election judge.

We were busy but not overwhelmed.  There was a long line outside when we opened the polls at 7 am but after we worked through that line I don't think we had a line over more than a half dozen people at a time.  Still, the stream of voters were mostly steady and that helped the day pass quicker over the 15 hours we were at the voting site.

No machine or other problems this time and the election went smooth.

My only problem was the following.  Our polling place is in a church.  Each year - from prior to me working there to the present election - the judges took down all religious material for the election than replaced everything after the election.  Apparently they wanted no controversy about the separation of church and state.  No one ever complained one way or another, and neither did the pastors during my time.  The church doesn't have a pastor right now and apparently the church members complained about the last election and got the election dept to agree to not take the religious materials down for this election.  But no one told me.  So I got chewed out by a church official on election day when she saw we had taken down the religious posters and moved the table with all the religious material into a side hallway.  An election dept official apologized to me for forgetting to tell me about the new policy.