Cue forward two and a half months…
I reluctantly opened one eye to look at the alarm clock. It was still pretty dark, my team had snatched defeat from the clutches of victory the night before, I was sick with the flu and I hadn't slept particularly well. It was 5:14am. 5:14AM!!!! I had to be at the polls at 5am! I found out later that I had set the alarm for 4:25pm. Nice.
No time to shower, just an extra quick shave (30 seconds), brush teeth (20 seconds), wet hair (20 seconds), change (1 minute), kiss Sandee (30 seconds, withhold jokes please) and bolt out the door. Thankfully, the polling station was in the public library just across the street.
The "crew chief" wasn't amused about my fashionably late entrance, but I was soon put to work setting up the room and the polling machines. There was a dozen of us there, about half young (and clearly Democrat) and half over 70. The older people kept their political views to themselves, but the number of democrats and republicans in a polling station is kept even. You figure out the math. Election day workers get paid $85 for the trouble, so technically it's not "volunteer" work.
The doors opened up at 6am to a short line. Did I say short line? In five minutes the wait would already be half an hour long. The process is pretty easy, voters show ID (anything except a Blockbuster card was OK), we checked the name off a list in two books (A-K, L-Z), gave them a yellow card, which they passed on to other volunteers at the voting machines. They were given brief instruction on the machines, voted, got their "I Voted" sticker and off they went.
Problem: Arlington decided last year that they are going to
upgrade their voting machines in 2001 so they didn't want to waste
money on any additional old style machines that they are using now
(they are pretty spiffy and electronic). So we ended up with four
machines with over 3,000 registered voters and 13 hours of voting
time. If you do the math, that makes it about one minute per voter
per machine. HAH!!
Some people had a decent idea of what they were going to vote for.
Most of the others had some sort of idea on the presidential vote,
but school board? County bond issues? Sheriff? People would
disappear behind the curtains for 10 minutes and come out looking
like they just finished the graduate school entrance exam. I won't
even talk about the senior citizen types with the walkers and
shaking hands.
I started working at the machines: "good morning", "are you familiar with the machines", "make sure you make all your selections before pressing the green 'Vote' button", "thanks for voting, don't forget your sticker". Three hours flew by. The line got longer. Thankfully it was a nice day, because the line moved outside, down the sidewalk and into the parking lot. At its worst, the wait was about 2:30 hours and I heard a bunch of people left before voting. I don't really blame them.
To make things worse, turnout was especially high as both the presidential and senatorial races were expected to be tight. In a normal election, less than 60% of the registered voters show up. By the end of the day we got 71%.
After a while I moved to the ID checking desk: "Hi!", "can I see your ID please?", "what's your current address?", "thanks, take this card to the voting machines". This was the exciting job. Voters who had just moved here from Ohio. "Register? I thought they did that automatically", or "I don't care if you don't have my name, I want to vote here, I am voting here". Try telling someone who's been in line for two hours that they should've gone to the polling station two blocks down the street.
Jokes aside, I was amazed at how seriously people take their duty to vote. I know Northern Virginia is a relatively rich part of the country, but standing in line, with a crying kid, for two hours to vote was a little beyond my expectation. Eighty percent of the folks who finally got to the voting area showed me their ID with a smile. A bunch of them took their kids with them into the booth.
Sometime in the morning Sandee came up to vote. I was working at A to K book so I got to ask for her ID and address. She brought me a nice care cooler with lunch, dinner, snacks, drinks and Sudafed for my flu. She had to wait in line two hours.
The hours began to drag on after about 5pm. Someone from the neighborhood had brought us cookies (really yummy), but the strain of the non-stop work was beginning to show: "can I see your address please", shaking hands with the person approaching the machine and saying "thank you", a couple of the crew walking around aimlessly with glazed looks on their faces. The two days of going without a shower started catching up with the deodorant.
We closed the polls at 7pm, but it took us another hour to process everyone already in the line. I was the last one to vote. I pressed the green "Vote" button with a smile. I was my second vote ever. The first one was back in 1979 voting "For" or "Against" the Islamic Republic while a machine gun totting Revolutionary Guard was standing next to the ballot box.
The work wasn't over. We spent the next two hours going through intensely detailed instructions on how to tabulate and call in the results. All of us had to sign every piece of paper to certify it. I thought I was closing the contract on a new house. We heard that Gore had won Florida (young people high five, old people have no expression). We heard that Florida was now up for grabs (young people sulk, old people have no expression). We finally wrapped up at a little past 10pm, seventeen hours after I looked up at the alarm clock, and I straggled to an election party at Maziar's place to cheers from the obviously tipsy crowd.
The result? In our district Gore (60%) beat Bush (32%) and Nader (7%) pretty handily and the Democratic senate candidate trounced his opponent by an even bigger 70/30 margin. Statewide, we had no effect. Both Democrats lost on the strength of the conservative military and Southern Virginia votes.
It's not a good time to ask me if I'd do it again, but I would highly recommend it if you've got an extra vacation day and feel like your internal supply of "doing the right thing" is getting a little bit low.
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