Tue, November 4th, 2008: Being Election Officer

A student as election officer…
Tuesday 4.11.08: I went to bed at 3.30am (doing readings for courses and reading the guide for election officers). I got up at 4.10am, cooked eggs and ham to eat breakfast with bread and cooked spaghetti (to take with me as lunch). After taking a shower I walked two blocks to be on time at 5am at the Arlington Arts Center (my polling place). Overall, about 18 election officer were assigned to work in this precinct. At 5am, we built up the voting room, i.e. set up the desks, chairs, voting machines, leaflets, marked queuing lines on the floor etc. The actual voting room was approx. 5 x 10 meters in its size. When the first voter came in, he went to the desk for with the three poll books (3 electronic ones) to check-in as voter (i.e. the ID, name/address is checked and compared to the registration rolls on the poll books). If a voter was correctly registered, he got a yellow voter permit for the day to vote on all issues. Other colors restricted special voters to the federal elections or the presidential elections only.
Then a voter would proceed to the second desk was for deciding whether to vote by paper ballot or by machine. Each voter could opt for either one. If the choice was voting by machine, voters kept their yellow (or other colored ) permit and went on to stand in line for the machines (we had four, i.e. WINvote machines).
If opted for paper ballot, the two election officers at the desk took the yellow card and handed out the paper ballot (Arlington County ballot, contained: election of president/VP, one Senator, one House Rep (8th district), one member for the county board and two persons for the local school board as well as five ballot issues (four about whether to issue bonds for some purposes (for the metro, utilities, community infrastructure and public schools) and one about whether to activate a Redevelopment and Housing Authority in Arlington (was rejected clearly).
The voters then filled out the paper ballots at a desk (four seats only, with cardboard shields on the side, so no one could look on their ballots), and put it through the scanner, next to an election officer, called Accuvote which optically counted the vote.
The Winvote machines were touch screen-based systems (strangely, the Virginia state legislature apparently decided in 2007 against the purchase of more touch-screen or similar voting machines, so the electoral Board decided to opt for optical scanners (rental!!) in order to make sure to have enough capacity on election day).
Voting on the Winvote machines was straightforward: in order to re-activate (after a voter has posted his votes and finished the process), each time an election officer had to take the next person in line and put in his card to activate the system for the voter to start casting his votes (i.e. to prevent multiple/abusive use). Besides one brief incident (apparently related to power supply) the machines worked fine.

The precinct (Monroe, # 49) has about 1600 registered voters, of which about 900 or so voted. Both Winvote and Accuvote machines (overall five devices have been at our place) have an individual tally which we printed out three times after the closure of the polls at 7pm. Then the tallies have been checked, added together etc. If I recall correctly, Obama won by a sizeable margin (about 600 votes against McCain’s some 260).

From 6am onwards, I worked first at the Winvote, welcoming voters and advising them how to operate, and handed out stickers (“I voted in Arlington”) until about 10am, when the major wave of voters was over. Then I voted by myself on the Winvote and subsequently took a seat at the table with the paper ballots (worked (and more talked there between 10-1 and 5-6pm) and in between sitting around and waiting, eating, trying to learn (while falling asleep several times) Micro (last midterm was Micro, on Nov 7th). I had some good conversations with fellow election officers. One had Iranian roots and worked as a director in a law firm, another was originally from Dakota and worked for the FDIC. I could share some thoughts about the Swiss system (how they vote over there, the referenda of Nov 30 in Switzerland etc.) A Japanese-American woman invited me to a Japanese-US panel on education and IT later on. Particularly glad I was when one of my fellow roommates came at about 4pm to cast his vote and take this picture.

Stunning was that most of the voters came early in the morning, so that after 10am not many people came (between 1 and 4pm was almost nobody voting). The first people started to build a line in front of the polling place at 5.30am, so between 6 and 9am we all have been pretty busy and the place was crowded.