Ten of us are sitting on the floor in the former cathedral of Hope Lutheran Church in Palm Desert, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of large paper ballots, strewn everywhere. We’ve emptied our blue ballot boxes and we’re stacking the voted ballots in groups of 10.
Also on the floor are stacks of vote-by-mail ballots that people brought with them to the polls. There are also piles of “provisional” ballots, cast by those who either didn’t match our records or were voting out-of-precinct.
And it’s a mess.
The polls have finally closed after a grueling 13 hours of greeting voters, registering their attendance, verifying their information, instructing them on the vagaries of a four-page ballot filled with Propositions (written with the clarity of electronics’ owners’ manuals translated from the Korean) … and we are exhausted.
Two precincts are housed in this hall and neither of us is coming up with the right figures for the day. We’re a couple of votes off, first six, then three. Perhaps, we say to each other, some of the voters put their ballots in the wrong blue boxes, although, during the day I made myself quite annoying reminding voters that if they registered in the precinct to the left they had to put their ballots in the blue box on the left and vice-versa. I did this because ballots cast in the wrong box are not counted and we are charged with making sure that every vote counts. (At one point, apparently angry at the whole world, one voter shushed me when I yelled these instructions, raising my voice to be heard in this high-vaunted space. Thanks for that, by the way.)
We are quite the crew, all of us. Most of us are either retired or semi-retired and, youth will be served, we are being assisted ably by students from nearby Palm Desert High School and, under court order, also by a wise Latina who is there to assist any Spanish-speaking voters.
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The day starts at 5:30 a.m. with a stop at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where manager Cody and the morning crew prepared a coffee caddy for me to take to the polls, along with delicious pastries. (Polls run on sugar.)
At six, the crews arrive at the church and, uh-oh, we discover that the precinct inspector for 42045 has taken quite ill and will not be coming. Since I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade, election after election, I think we can manage but it is Diversion Unnecessary. (The ill precinct inspector landed in the emergency room.) We plow ahead anyway, waiting for a representative from the Board of Elections, our “Range Inspector,” a clinical psychologist and former cop with the patience of Job, to arrive and fill in, helping to set up the other precinct.
We spend the next hour getting ready, putting out the signs, making sure the “booths” (actually, suitcases) are ready, arranging our tables so that voters won’t be confused when they walk in and, with masking tape, sticking the various legal documents on surfaces where they can be read. We have one electronic voting machine but we have been discouraged, in a two-and-a-half-hour training program a week prior to the election, not to offer this as an alternative to the huge paper ballots. (Voting by machine was decertified when California saw what was happening around the country with computer-hacking and possible political shenanigans.)
At 7 a.m., we are ready for the first voter and so it goes, hour after hour for the next 13, as a steady stream of voters is processed through the system. As Precinct Inspector, I greet each voter, direct him or her to the proper line (the precincts follow a fairly predictable geographical pattern, based on their residences), then loosely supervise the processing of the voters (my crew is aces, a well-oiled machine), answering the odd questions (I live in Indio, can I still vote here? My ballot never came in the mail, what do I do?) plying the crew with caffeine and the protein and vitamins derived from pizza prepared and delivered by Papa Dan (quite tasty).
And, finally!, it is 8 p.m. And we are exhausted. But now comes the most important part of the election — collating the ballots, creating a ballot statement that shows the results and driving these results to the Palm Desert Library where a crew picks up the results and sends them to Riverside for final tabulation. And we are a couple of votes off in the tally. No matter how we try to reconcile the figures, the math is off by a little but it's a little like being almost pregnant. Clearly, one or two of these votes will not be counted here. Our only hope is that somewhere down the line, it will all fit together, that whatever tiny mistake we made, by either miscounting or by votes inadvertently cast in the wrong ballot box or simple mathematical error, it will all come out right.
I think of the folks in walkers who came to the polls; the aged couple in the car to whom I brought out the ballots to make sure they voted, the laborers who had to get to work but insisted on voting first, and the unfortunate voters who played by the rules but whose names somehow didn’t make it onto the rolls and who voted “provisionally,” meaning that their voices will be heard but not tonight… and I wonder.
Why are the county supervisors being so hard on the Election officials? Why this massive hurry to get the results? What would it hurt to delay announcing anything for a couple of days so there is time to reconcile the results?
I have never met the director who is under fire, the one who takes the heat every election season. I have no stake in any of the politics of this.
But, hey, isn’t there a better way to do this?
On the way to delivering the ballots to the Library pick-up area, I chat with another officer. We seem to hit upon an idea.
Why not hire two teams to work on Election Day? There’s the crew that handles the polling-place setup, the 13-hour day of voting, the long hours of making sure everyone who wants to, gets to vote.
And then at 8 p.m., they are sent home, replaced by a fresh crew of workers who, unfazed by a day of detail-oriented trivia and bushy-tailed enough to bring energy to the process, count the ballots and tabulate the results. Keep the Precinct Inspector on hand for that but send the rest of the crew home, mission accomplished.
A bit more expensive, perhaps. But do the math: How much was spent this time on the round-the-clock crews counting the mail-in ballots?
I probably don’t have a vote on trying this, of course. I’m just a cog in the machine. But maybe it will count.
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