Debriefing the Primary Election

Texas was part of super Tuesday, holding our election on Tuesday. Mr. Spherical Model and I worked at our polling place. And I’d like to do something of a debrief, because there are things to learn and other things to be concerned about. This isn’t going to be about who won any races.

As usual, Mr. Spherical Model served as presiding judge (PJ), and I was a bilingual clerk. I worked only part of the day. I came in at noon and worked through closing, precinct convention, and delivering our polling materials to the drop-off center. Anyway, I didn’t experience the setup. But I experienced the results of it all day.

Against all our requests, the middle school we were in refused, again, to place the Republican and Democrat polling places in separate rooms. So we shared the orchestra room. It’s tight enough to cause some discomfort—maybe especially for voters. But it was not quite impossibly awkward.

Mr. Spherical Model and our alternate judge (AJ), who, because this was the primary, is also a Republican, came to the school late in the day Monday to set up. This included setting up tables, and placing—but not opening or unsealing—the e-slate booths. And JBCs, e-pollbooks, and papers remained at our house until Tuesday morning, with the official cell phone being charged overnight.

The Democrat workers came later. Mr. Spherical Model had set it up so that each party could have two welcoming tables for check-in, more or less parallel. But the Democrat PJ wanted to assert her independence by setting things up differently. That’s their choice. But the consequences affected us all day long.

I’ve drawn up a diagram, because this was pretty crazy.

Our voting room, a middle school orchestra room, not necessarily to scale.
I think the voting booths took up more space than shown.

All voters come in the same door. Then they meet a greeter who guides them to a check-in table for their chosen party. You can see that the Republican tables—both of them, are easily accessible. The Democrats’ check-in table (they only wanted to use one, with both JBC machines on it) was over to the far half of the room, but not in sight. Around a corner. Past all their voting booths. You can’t see in my drawing, but, because of the height of the booths, their check-in table was invisible until they rounded the corner.

If they had had a greeter who would meet their voters and guide them to their table, fine. But they didn’t. They did have a greeter outside (so did we) to direct people to our room, which had its own door to the outside, so they wouldn’t wander through the school. Occasionally the Democrats had someone, down beyond that random table for paperwork, who would guide them to the check-in table, if we could get them that far.

The difficulty was, if they saw our second table, but not that far side of the whole room with nothing directing them there, they would head to our second table. Right in front of them, on our table, was a sign indicating it was for Republican voters, and a sign taped to the front of the table as well. And we had tried to explain to them, “Republicans are voting in this half of the room; Democrats are voting in that side of the room,” pointing all the way over there.

We’re not supposed to presume things. But we know from statistics that 90+% of blacks vote Democrat. A fair percentage of Hispanic voters as well. Anyway, all but one of the Democrat workers were black. None probably from this precinct, which has what is probably a normal distribution of around 12% black (none live on our very diverse street). So, if they were black and started walking toward one of our tables, we would have to ask, “So you’re a Republican voter?” At which they would look horrified at us, say, “No! Democrat.” And we would have to walk them past their tiny entrance sign, and sometimes walk to the aisle between their voting booths, and point to their check-in table.

After the first twenty or so, I was finding that to be pretty annoying. Why not let them just flounder until the Democrat workers took care of the problem of their making? But Mr. Spherical Model reminded me to smile and be a goodwill ambassador. Which I did.

There was a man, well into the day, Hispanic, who answered the “which party” question with, “Democrat. I don’t like Republicans,” right to my face while I had been smiling and treating him respectfully. Mr. Spherical Model saw the exchange and said, “Smile anyway.” Maybe at some point they’ll realize the good people helping them were Republicans. And maybe they’ll even notice the ones setting up the room badly and making their lives more difficult in many annoying ways are often Democrats. Who knows? At least we are who we are, regardless of what they say about us.

The Democrats were unprepared in many ways—some of which got reported (because I took our AJ outside and called our ballot security guy on my phone for her to report to) for being essentially illegal, even though I am unaware of anything they did to commit any actual voter fraud.

There’s a protocol for setting up a polling place. Everything comes very organized. Boxes containing big, labeled envelopes and accordion folders, with papers for certain purposes. There’s a checklist. All you have to do is go down the checklist, and you’re set up correctly. If you do that correctly, the day tends to run smoothly, and then you just follow the closing checklists at the end of the day.

They didn’t use the checklist. They just laid everything out all over their back table, spread it around, looked for what they thought they needed, and did it their way. They had the machines connected to take voters at 7:00 AM, but any other business, like signing in workers and giving them the oath, got left undone. And there were papers they said they weren’t given, so we shared ours with them. Our AJ their original supply lying around on their table later; they just hadn’t found them, because, as their bristly PJ said, “I have my own way of organizing things.”

By law we’re required to give a voter count every two hours. It prevents fraud by showing what kind of voter traffic there was throughout the day. You get the count from your JBC machines added together. Their PJ was reminded by one of their workers that she needed to do that. She didn’t want to bother. This is what it looked like at the end of the day.

their mostly unmarked vote count at the end of the day

I can find out how many in my precinct voted on election day, and in early voting. But, because of countywide voting (first time it’s been done in a primary election here), I can’t find out how many voters came to vote Democrat at our polling place. Also because of countywide voting, we no longer get a printed tape of voting on each machine for that day, since the machine now includes ballots from all over the county. That’s one less check against fraud.

Only once during the day did we have to cancel a vote because the voter got all the way to the booth with her code entered in the machine before realizing she had the wrong ballot in front of her. So we had to cancel that, which, because it’s a rare occurrence, was a bit of a challenge to do correctly, so that she could afterward go to the Democrats and get a new code. If we hadn’t been so diligent in getting voters to the right party, that painful problem could have been happening all day long.

We got a lot of questions from voters. I don’t mind answering these. You don’t know what you don’t know sometimes—until you ask and learn about it. One common question was, “Why are we separated? Don’t we usually just vote together?” Yes, but this is a primary election, in which you decide which candidates should be representing your party on the November ballot. “Oh, OK.” They learn by asking. But it’s concerning they were voting in a primary election without knowing what a primary election is.

A variation that I find humorous is, “Why can’t I vote straight ticket?” Because all the candidates on your ballot are of the same party; this is to decide who the candidates for your party will be. I mostly didn’t mention that straight-ticket voting has now been ended by the legislature, so there will be no more one-button voting for Democrats anymore. Republicans tend to be deeper thinkers and want to read all the way down the ballot, and will leave blanks where they don’t know enough about the candidates in a particular race. Too many Democrats follow orders: “You don’t need to know anything about the candidates; just vote Democrat, and that’s all you need to know.” So they’re confused about how to vote a primary ballot. And this year the Democrats will be starting a campaign to get their voters to go all the way down the ballot, instead of just voting top of the ballot and leaving.

Ignorance can be solved by education and experience, so there’s hope for change. But you can’t fix stupid. One voter said, “How am I supposed to know who to vote for when I haven’t heard of any of these names?” Indeed. Maybe you should do some research, using your sample ballot and the internet (before you show up to vote in ways that affect us all, I also thought but didn’t say).

At one point I had a nice little conversation with their outside greeter that made my day. He’d said it was good to show the world how well we get along. Because the news makes it sound like we’re all at war. But really we’re all just people, people who happen to disagree on some things, but we can let that go and get along. I really appreciated that. It was more like other times we’ve shared the polls with Democrats, who are not mostly different from us; they just haven’t been educated to think through issues the way we have.

What I think is, many blacks and Hispanics around here are religious people, who serve God and value strong families. It makes no sense to me why they would vote Democrat, when that agenda is anti-religion and anti-family, and has the added deficiency of causing huge economic roadblocks. People who love freedom, prosperity, and civilization shouldn’t be voting for tyranny, poverty, and savagery by voting Democrat.

I don’t assume my Democrat neighbors are bad people; I assume they don’t know enough. The question, then, is how to reach out and speak to voters who have been blindly voting Democrat, because they’ve been told “they’re the good guys,” when what these voters really want is the freedom to live their lives as they choose, in ways that lead to directly out of poverty toward prosperity, and in ways that coincide with their natural love of civilization. We’ll all be better off if they can hear that message and have it sink in.