Thread by @textfiles

I did want to mention one thing about my election day work yesterday, in my upstate NY town. I've done one big election before, and I also hung out with other workers who knew how the voting line tends to go. We could check in most people in about 30-60 seconds, in general.

Sometimes it was more (the registration had lapsed, or they came to the wrong location to vote, or they had moved recently and needed to get what's called an Affidavit vote, which takes time to explain) but in general, I did my best with my partner to move as fast as possible.

As an election worker in my state, you arrive at 5am for 1 hour of setup. Open at 6am. Stay open, no breaks, to 9pm. Anyone on line at 9pm gets to vote, no exceptions. We were overseeing two wards. One had 1,325 registered members. The other had 6.

Yeah,. 6! We had a whole second station set up for a ward with six people. Two came in that day! We did a little cheer when they each showed up. It's called Pocket Road, which is a lovely name. I don't know the story.

The other 1,325 folks in our ward could vote. Unless they'd voted during early voting. Or mailed in their votes. I'll cut to the chase - roughly 650 voted that day in our polling location. 650! Entire families. Parents bringing children. 4 people voted with their dogs.

Parents who were there to vote where one came in, waited in line, and then went home, where the other parent came in and did the same, to watch the kids. Two monks from the abbey across my street whose parking lot I'll grab steps in.

But there was one thing about this whole day that was, looking back, pretty amazing.

Remember what I said about poll workers knowing the Rhythm of voting, and how people tend to show up? It goes like this: A rush at opening, to get votes before going to work. A lunch rush, because getting out of work to vote. And then a bunch at the end, after.

Didn't happen.

At 5:30, we were still setting up. It was about 30-35F outside the school we were in. Someone went out and said "there's 5 people waiting outside". At 5:45, it was 20. At opening, it was 50.

We're checking in people, but it's quickly 100.

People are coming in to vote and they're having trouble using the registration pad because their hands are frozen. We figured out a safe way to snake them into the hallway of the elementary school so they stopped being frozen. I was blasting through to minimize outside folks.

Voting started at 6am.

We did not stop having one person after another at the intake station until 1pm.

Easily went past 450 voters by 1pm. One after another, families and the rest. No breaks, no lulls.

From 1pm to about 5:30pm, it was really quiet. Maybe a few dozen people. So one or two would come in at once, and then nothing for 10-15 minutes, then a small set of folks, then more.

We braced for the after work people, the ones whose crap bosses wouldn't let them off to vote.

Between 5:50 and 7, another rush of folks came in, just like the morning. We were a humming processor at that point, though sometimes getting it down to 10 seconds a person. (It was me and an ipad and a choreography with my co-ingestor. We nailed it.)

And then...

Between 7 and 9, when we closed, we had maybe 6 people. And from 8pm to 9pm, we had no people. We had zero. People.

Beacon, NY's Ward 3 Districts 3 and 2 had FINISHED. VOTING.

A bunch of times I walked outside of the polling place, while a whole staff read their phones and sat around, just looking up and down the road, seeing if anyone was lost, confused, or anything else. Zero. Nothing. Not a person for 90 minutes, traditionally among the busiest.

So that happened.

Quick coda: The system let me see how many people were linked as voting, by the way. It wasn't 1,325 - 650 people who didn't vote. It was 5 days of early voting that had happened before this election day, which had thousands and thousands of votes, along with the mail-ins.