Welp it’s 6PM and the one judge with the key to our equipment is nowhere to be found so this is all going great.
Also according to the signal strength indicator it’s possible I moved our precinct into a faraday cage so go me!
Flash update: we have established contact with the poll tech. Her first question: “do you have the key to the equipment?”
We called the supply hotline. I got an actual busy signal, like it’s 1985.
Hitting this number over and over like I’m calling in a request for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones to Q101.
Been on hold for 20 minutes. Every few second a message helpfully informs me that there will be silence while I continue to hold.
Hey @send9 it’s just a dumb cylinder lock. If you drove over to pick it I’d still be on hold when you got here.
KEY LOCATED. It’s in Bellwood. Off I go!
We have been given (wait for it) no disinfecting supplies.
None of the passwords work for anything.
Everything has the wrong time so nothing will start and we can’t reset the time.
We ultimately had to abandon setup. Our polling tech — who is great — has been working early voting for days and hasn’t had a decent night sleep in lord knows how long. She’ll be back there at 4:30AM.
I ultimately got things working (they gave us the wrong passcode, but the right passcode was guessable). But the pollbooks have to update the voter rolls, and that process was ticking tenths of a percent every 5 minutes.
So we’ll get in tomorrow bright and early in the morning/late at night and hope the update process actually works this time, or else I guess we’ll be turning voters away.
Major extra bonus points for Cook County staffing a supply/equipment hotline that closed at 8PM the night before. We didn’t even have keys until after 7PM, because they locked our keys INTO the locked polling station.
I’ve been a startup person since, hmm, 1995. I’ve blown up multiple companies. The Matasano partners can’t even call each other on the phone without risking small heart attacks. I’ve seen some shit. Nothing has ever demoralized me like this.
But, on the upside, I’m so likely to be exposed tomorrow that I’ll need to quarantine myself for a week. 
(i know it’s weeks plural let me hold out hope that i’m asymptomatic next wednesday)
By the way: you can’t buy hand sanitizer or gloves anywhere in Chicago right now, at least that I can tell, and the two election judges that actually showed up (several bailed) didn’t blink about donating their own supplies. We’ll have disinfecting stuff.
Couldn’t sleep. Headed over at 4.30. Got the poll books working, God willing.
First successful vote.
About 20 votes so far. It’s light.
Turnout seems such that I won’t run out of hand sanitizer for voters or isopropyl for the pens and stuff. Cool County dropped off a handful (literally) of swabs.
Decent steady turnout; no spike in the morning because people are WFH. Machines working smoothly. About half through my bottle of isopropyl. Exhausted but not despairing like last night. I blame Matt Blaze!
Now would be a GREAT time to get a pro-DNSSEC post onto the orange site. I’d be powerless to stop you.
So @boboTjones gave me cavacide wipes and at present you could perform an appendectomy on our voting equipment.
Lunch break!
First genuinely rude voter of the day.
Done.
