On Tuesday it was the Massachusetts primary. I volunteered to work at the election. It was interesting, but also slightly boring. In my town, they allow you to volunteer/work for only half the day, which is good because it starts at 6:30 in the morning and doesn't end until after 10 PM. Apparently in some towns it's all or nothing – I was talking to a friend who also volunteers for the polls and she was surprised we had a half day option. I worked in the afternoon, you are not surprised. I wore my mask, and I think I was the only worker doing so. I did see a couple of voters wearing masks. I figure, it's kind of like taking public transit – everybody in the town might come. There are a million different jobs, and mine had slightly too many people doing it at the time that I did it. I processed advanced/early voting ballots. People are allowed to drop off their ballots at the town hall, and throughout the day someone (two people actually – anytime there's ballots involved, you need two people to keep yourselves honest) would go up to the town hall and fetch whatever had come in, which generally numbered in the 5-10 range. Then you need people working in pairs, and they have to be "different parties". My town is heavily Democratic, and it's a good thing that "unenrolled/independent" counts as "different". Most of the unenrolled people choose the Democratic primary ballot, but they get their choice, and so if they stay unenrolled then they maintain that status. Somebody was speculating about "what do you even get by actually registering as a Democrat", and we didn't actually know, other than obvious things like being able to serve on committees for the Democratic Party, but none of us did. Anyway these pairs check off people from a printed list of those who had requested early ballots, and open the envelope (but don't extract the ballot). Then we walk over to the regular check-in desk for the precinct (we have 5 precincts and they all vote in the same place, so there's this whole lineup of check-in tables), and go through the process of checking in the early ballot person. Then we walk past all of the voting booths, to the tabulator machine, interact with the person staffing that machine, extract the ballots from the envelopes, and "without looking at them", stick them into the machine, and make sure that the machine accepts them. So each ballot takes a few minutes. We do them in batches if there is more than one for a particular precinct, so there is some speed up there, but only the actually walking the circuit of the gym portion is saved. So about once an hour there was a flurry of 10-15 minutes of work. There would've been more work if there had been fewer people doing this job; we had 2-3 pairs (some had other "free floating" jobs). Probably there was a lot more work for the morning shift because they had to handle anything that had been dropped in the ballot box since Friday when they made up the checklist of "who had requested such ballots". Early voting and advance ballots prior to Friday were processed at the town hall and fed into the tabulator machines there before election day. As a result, I got quite a bit of my book read. I wasn't sure before I got there what kind of dead time there would be, so I brought a novel, and a bunch of things I didn't care as much about like magazines. I ended up reading the novel mostly. Even the check-in desk and the tabulator staff had some dead time, though probably not as much, because midafternoon is not a high volume voting time. You could tell when 6 PM came around because there was a big flurry of commuters stopping to vote on the way home. At the end of the night there's a whole counting situation, because we have some stuff done by computers at the check-in desk, but also a paper check-in that needs to be consistent with the computer part. And then they had to look at all of the ballots from the machines to handle write-ins. My job had some consistency checking at the end with the check-in books that we had been using, but not as long as the other people. So I ended up doing a lot of teardown and cleanup. There were signs in lots of places that needed to be removed from the gym, and there was a break room we had with food that needed to be organized and either thrown out or found somebody to take home, and there were piles of pens and such to be re-boxed, and chairs and tables to fold up. The counting people were not done when everything except the things they were sitting on and at had been cleaned up, and so I went to the town clerk and said "put me to work or send me home" and he sent me home around 9:45. I don't know when the counting people finished. They had called a few of the elections by the time I got home, and so that must mean that other towns have more automated ways of reporting. Or, maybe we have a preliminary report that we send based on non-write-in votes. Perhaps next time I will have a different job and I will end up being one of the counting people and staying until 11. I had my option of volunteering or being paid approximately minimum wage. I elected to volunteer, because "tax the rich". The town can use the money for something else. comments