This is What Democray Looks Like

Where has this week gone? Lost, it seems, in busy-ness and some recurring neck and shoulder pain (and I'm sure the two are related.)

As you probably heard, ad nauseum, Wisconsin held its presidential primary election on Tuesday. I decided to apply to be an election official. The elderly people at my polling place always look like they are having a good time, and I thought it would be a good citizen kind of thing to do, so I signed up and took the afternoon off from work to do it.

Last Saturday I went to a 2 hour training session. Immediately I was impressed with, not only the number of people there, but the diversity of the group: young, old, in between, all races. People really seem to care about this election in a way that I haven't noticed before. The city clerk led the training, which consisted of going over a whole slew of possible scenarios that could come up on voting day -- what id is needed to register to vote, when to issue a provisional ballot, how to do curbside voting when someone is physically unable to walk into the polling place, etc.

I was also struck by the feeling that the whole point of the voting process was to be accessible, not to limit access. Maybe the city clerk in Dade County, Florida gives the same song and dance to their election officials during training, but people seem to take it very seriously here.

So on Tuesday afternoon I showed up at my assigned polling place, the Gates of Heaven Synagogue in the heart of one of the largest student apartment neighborhoods in town. (Just as an aside, to any old Chicago blues fans out there: the official whom I was relieving was Jim Schwall, half of the legendary Siegel-Schwall Band from the sixties and seventies. Jim is a local guy, very nice, ran for mayor a few years ago.)

Madison allows on site voter registration, as long as the person has acceptable proof of their address, so from 1 p.m. until 8 when the polls closed, I sat at a table and registered new voters or filled out change-of-address forms. There was not any period of time when we were not busy. There was a window of about 2 hours when we were so busy I thought I was going to collapse! (Or as I said to my co-registrar, the last time I dealt with lines like those was 11-2 on 25¢ chili-dog Tuesdays back when I worked at the A&W as a teenager.) And still they kept coming. Right up until 8 p.m. (And one guy who wandered in around 9 when we were tallying the absentee ballots for the ward. He was disappointed.)

We use paper ballots and optical scanners to read them. Periodically the scanner would become full or jammed. At that point the site supervisor would call for the attention of everyone in the room. She would say something like, "Hear ye, hear ye. [Yes, she really said that. She'd probably been waiting her entire life for an opportunity to say that.] I need to let everyone present know that we will be opening the opening the ballot box and removing ballots. Those ballots will be put in a secure place and counted. I am not doing anything illegal." At which point everyone in the room would burst into spontaneous applause. And the mayhem would continue.

Wisconsin restores voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences. (Another big difference between us and Florida, besides the 6 foot piles of snow that we are currently experiencing.) However I did have a list, 2 pages double-sided, of possible residents of that ward who are on parole and would not be able to vote. As far as I know, not one of them tried to.

One woman who had worked at that location for the last 8 years said that she had never seen the number of voters go beyond 500. By the end of the evening the scanner had counted 1,319 votes.

I had no idea before this that absentee ballot are sent to the ward in which the absentee voter would normally vote. After the polls closed, we had to open, assign a voter number to and scan all of the absentee ballots. (And so much for confidentiality -- I got to see who a former student teacher of mine had voted for. Hee hee.)

Ladies and gentlemen, here are the final stats for the polling at Gates of Heaven synagogue:

Democrats
Kucinich … 8
Clinton … 233
Biden … 0
Gravel … 1
Dodd … 1
Obama … 997
Edwards … 5
Richardson … 0
Write-in … 3 (I know that at least one of these was for Russ Feingold)

Republicans
Hunter … 0
Thompson (Fred, not Tommy our former governator who hated teachers) … 0
Tancredo … 0
Romney … 1
Paul … 31
Huckabeebee … 9
McCain … 28
Giuliani … 0
Write-in … 2 (and at least one of these was for Rush Limbough, misspelled)

I got home at around 10:30 p.m., utterly exhausted. (One big problem that would be easy to address is the lighting in the building. It is an historic building, now owned by the city parks department and rented out for weddings, funerals, and contra dances, and the lighting, quite frankly -- and I'm going to use a word here that I always tell my kids not to use -- sucked. What gives? Bring in some supplemental lighting for Pete's sake!) I still don't feel like I have recovered. It was like being run over by stampeding ... probably donkeys, is the most accurate thing to say here, given the outcome. But it was an enlightening experience. If I do it again -- and that is an if -- because come November it will be even crazier, I know -- I'll take lots of healthy snacks with me and I don't think I'll do registration.

All in all it was a good glimpse into something that I just take for granted.