It had been one long day.
We arrived at 6am, helped set up until the polls opened at 7am. When the doors opened we probably had at least 40 people waiting and remained steady for the next two hours or so. By midday the traffic lessened considerably; the numbers arriving to vote remained steady but manageable for the rest of the day. The expected late evening rush before closing at 8pm never materialized.
Susie and I, like the other five poll workers on our team, rotated jobs: checking IDs, prepping ballots, helping with the tabulator. We sat down twice for maybe 20 minutes or so each time to grab a bite to eat but otherwise we were up and at it. Everyone was cordial, pleasant, and patient with no personality clashes or untoward behavior. Aside from a few technical glitches the day went off well indeed. Oh, and the people we worked with:, Joyce, Jim, Lorraine, Geoffrey and his mother Barbara, precinct chair, were friendly, funny and a genuine pleasure to spend 15 hours with.
Although the polls closed at 8pm our work wasn’t done. We all had to put things away, pack things, up, tally things up; and there were a lot of things. The machines had to be shut down, tables put away, equipment broken down, things to be sealed up and put away. The various ballots and precinct paperwork — of which there was a lot — had to be gathered up, tallied up. Most importantly, the results from the electronic tabulators had to be (1) printed out three times and then (2) sent electronically via a special modem to the servers in downtown Grand Rapids, the county seat. We hit a snag when the results were transmitted but no receipt was printed out and the machine hung up completely refusing to shut down and refusing really to do anything at all. After a hour or so, the township clerk — already dealing with scores of similar problems no doubt at the other precincts— showed up and the problem was soon fixed.
By a little after 9pm everything was ready to go to the next and final stage in this process, dropping all the materials off at the township hall. Since Susie and I were the token Democrats we had to accompany the precinct chair for this part and stand/sit around and wait to have all our voting materials crosschecked and properly processed for moving on to wherever all that paper was destined to go.
Once done, we headed home, poured a short glass of red wine and talked about our experience during the day.
As we went to bed we wondered, like you no doubt, what Wednesday morning would bring. All we could now was wait.
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