What could go wrong at a polling place?

Everything, says an experienced poll worker.

By Cary Tennis

Nov 11, 2000 | My wife and I were standing in our garage in the Sunset District of San Francisco three years ago when a man wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches walked in, looked around and said, "This garage would make a good polling place." He worked for the San Francisco Department of Elections. The people who had hosted elections for years in our neighborhood had decided they didn't want to do it anymore. (In San Francisco, voting is often done in the garages of private homes.) So our garage became the neighborhood's new polling place. I became an elections inspector and my wife became a clerk.

The first thing you do to become a poll worker is attend a class that lasts about an hour and a half. The thing is, it's like sitting through an hour-and-a-half explanation of how to play tennis and then going out and playing. All that instruction doesn't really cover what happens when a ball comes hurtling at you. You only learn by doing.

What does it take to be an election worker? I think you have to be a citizen and you have to be alive, and I'm not really sure about the alive part. When you go to these classes you look around and you realize: We poll workers are the dregs of society! We're old, we're addled, we're eccentric, we're society's overflow! This is not some well-oiled machine of government.

Plus, each election is different depending on whether it's general, special, local, a runoff, whatever. Each year, elections departments "make things better" by thinking up new ways to handle the balloting or introducing new machines and new ballot types. I'm sure that elections supervisor in Palm Beach County thought she was solving a problem by using that now-famous "butterfly" ballot. By using that design, she could use bigger type so old folks could read the ballot more easily.

Since the elections department is always "improving" the process, we've learned to figure it out on our own, our guiding principle being: Get as accurate a vote as we can, whatever it takes. We don't always follow the rules. We don't always even know what the rules are. We're not professionals. We just do the best we can. And I'm sure that's what most of the poll workers throughout America did on Tuesday. They did the best they could.

Here's how the balloting worked in San Francisco this election. For years results have come in too slowly in San Francisco, and the newspapers and the public have decried the inefficiency. So this year we got the Optech Eagle. It's a machine about 3 feet high, 2 feet wide and 4 feet long that reads ballots marked with a pen and feeds them into bins below. If you mark a ballot twice, it rejects your ballot and prints out a message: "Overvote."

You can then override the error message and put the ballot through, or, if the voter has made a genuine error and wants to revote, you take the one ballot card -- did I mention there were three ballot cards to constitute one "ballot" this time? -- write "spoiled" on it, pull three new ballot cards to keep the numbers in sequence, hand the voter the fresh ballot to replace the one that was spoiled, write spoiled on the other two and put them in a special box of spoiled ballots.

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