Part of the Process
Monday night, I sat in the Arlington County Library Auditorium and took the two hour class on how to be an election worker. I learned how to read the pollbook, how to identify a legitimate ID (hint, your utility bill can work, in a pinch.) and where all the checks and balances in the process lie. I even learned that if you’re not on the pollbook, you can still vote a provisional ballot, which get examined the next day. I learned how to set up a touchscreen voting machine, even if I don’t think they’re all that secure, or all that reliable.
Overall, it’s an intense process. What gives me faith in our system is the process sheets that I was given. The documentation for an election is incredible. Signatures. Checks and Balances. Cards. People. Criteria. Benefit of the Doubt. The process behind elections is what make them great, not whether or not you’re voting on a touchscreen or on a paper ballot, or yanking on a lever.
Become part of the process. Your faith in elections is faith in people, and working on election day is part of that process.
If I had HBO I would be watching it tomorrow at 9 — they’re running a documentary about electronic voting called Hacking Democracy.
Of course part of the reason the elections have so much documentation is that they have to work with a volunteer percentage of workforce that’s just astonishing. We hear the quip often about how we demonstrate how important we REALLY think education is with what we pay our teachers, but what about what we pay our election workers?
It’s an interesting thing, though I’m unsure I see a solution – how else do you deal with a workforce that does most of its labor in a 72 hour period and little the rest of the year?