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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
