I’ve been serving as an election judge for more than sixteen years now and I have to admit I’m not looking forward to the election this time around. I originally began this gig to do my civic duty and to meet my neighbors and I still enjoy that part well enough. But my sense is that there are some pretty angry people out there and some of that anger is bound to be turned against me just because I’m there. The strategy of the news media these days in perseverating on allegations of people being disenfranchised and voting fraud seems to be to introduce a relationship of antagonism between voters and the election process.
I had just started this blog last spring and posted my reflections on the primaries in my posts It’s not a pretty story and Chicago Election Day Diary.
Tomorrow I’ll be working on the absentee voting at Glen Elston Nursing Home again. It’s only a half-day job so it’s nowhere near as exhausting as the election day activities. But it has its own distinct kind of distress.
First of all, it’s not a particularly happy or pleasant place. No one, residents or staff, are there because they want to be there. And quite a few of the residents are just barely there at all. Some have serious emotional or physical problems.
Our day has two parts. In the first part the ambulatory residents come to the area we’ve set up in a little meeting room and vote. Voting proceeds much as it does on election day. Each person comes up to the desk, we check their registration, issue them a ballot, ask if they want a demonstration, assist them to the private voting areas we’ve set up, and answer any questions. We aren’t allowed to do any politicking, give advice on who to vote for, or help with the actual voting.
The second part of our day is going to the rooms of the non-ambulatory residents. One election judge from each of the two major political parties goes to the room of each voter who’s not able to come down to the voting area. We give the voter his or her ballot, offer them a demonstration, allow them to vote as privately as possible under the circumstances, answer any questions, and take the ballots back down to the voting area we’ve set up downstairs. We do our utmost to balance the considerations of allowing the voter the greatest opportunity to vote and giving the voter privacy to cast his or her votes.
There’s no Internet access so I won’t be live-blogging. I may also swing by the polling place where I’ll be working on Tuesday and see if there’s any possibility of live-blogging from there.
