My Day as an Election Judge
As other political junkies spent yesterday evening watching the slow count of votes from the Maryland primary, I was grinding into my fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth hours as an election judge. I entered my precinct before 6 a.m. and didn’t leave until almost 11 p.m.
It wasn’t supposed to be quite that grueling — the polls were slated to close at 8 p.m., and tear down only takes an hour because both a Republican judge and Democratic judge are required to participate in just about every step to guarantee that there is no partisan hanky-panky. But there’s just no having an election without someone getting worried about something, and in Maryland’s case, it was some pretty nasty weather. Polling places were ordered to take provisional ballots until 9:30 p.m. to make sure that no one lost an opportunity to vote.
What did I notice?
Our precinct had a pretty high number of provisional ballots: plenty of people came to vote who clearly hadn’t done so for years. We’re talking about people with addresses on the books that they’d left before the last presidential election. This election has people turning out!
For an area that’s mostly families, we had an impressive youth turn out — many 17 year olds (who are eligible to vote in the Maryland primary as long as they’ll be 18 by the general election) turned up. The Maryland Democratic party has released numbers to the effect of 68% of these 17 year old voters have registered as Democrats, and those numbers held up. Then again, we did have 3 Democrats vote for every Republican yesterday.
Some judges work the polls because they feel fairly strongly about politics — but not a one of us was willing to commit ourselves to a political opinion beyond our party affiliation. There were a few of us who made it pretty clear that they were there for the $165 the county pays for a day of judging. The county had enlisted a number of those 17 year olds who were going to be voting for the first time — to a high school kid, $165 is a lot. They did take the job seriously, though, which I think counts in their favor.
The electronic voting machines are viewed lower than black magic in most people’s opinions. Even the judges had plenty of questions about them. However, we lucked out. Only one of our machines went down over the course of the polling. This is levels above the descriptions from experienced judges of past elections, when cards were missing, machines went down and other issues.
And the winner is…
Obama and McCain have carried the Potomac primaries. They carried my precinct as well. Those funny strips of paper in the picture above are the precinct totals which, by law, must be posted for public display. Cameras can’t be used in the polling place, but since the printouts from the electronic voting machines are public information, I snapped a picture with my phone for the readers of One Vote Matters
