forget your Unified Theory of Everything

Yesterday was largely a smoothly running operation. Once things got set up, it was easy to tell people to feed the ballot into the scanner until the machine caught it and to wait a moment for the confirmation screen, and being told to wait a moment as part of the general instructions helped people do so. There was a moment someone didn't wait, didn't see he'd marked his ballot badly enough it couldn't be read, and he was thankfully barely out the door for us to get him and tell him to fill out another one.

There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.

Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.

Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.

One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.

Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.

One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.

We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.

Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.