Working the polls

A lot has happened in the past month - we visited Madeline at DePaul, Pony came home - but I'll get back to that sometime sooner or later.

Yesterday, I was the clerk at one of our local election poll.  As clerk, I had to write the name and address of everyone who voted in the poll book.  I forgot my Ibuprofin.  My hands hurt.  Some interesting (to me) observations.

1. Someone in charge of creating the voting process at the Ohio Board of Elections (or maybe it's the Licking County Board of Elections) has a background in computer science.  We vote primarily using the Diebold touch-screen machines.  As part of the polling place set-up, we hang a sign in each machine, numbering them - 0, 1, 2, ... The only people I know who count from 0 are programmers.  And not just any programmers, but those that work in languages rooted in 'C', the languages that have curley braces, semi-colons, and base arrays at 0.
2. Big turnout.  Including our absentee voters, 85% of our registered voters voted.
3. My neighborhood has more Democrats in it than I thought - but still not very many.
4. My attempt at very subtle and subliminal pursuasion was futile.  A poll is a partisan-free zone.  No political buttons, shirts, hats, signs.  I wore my Blue Man Group t-shirt.  We still voted McCain over Obama 2-1.
5. If you want to avoid the lines, come in the afternoon. We had a line at the door before we opened, were packed until noon, and had a steady line until about 1pm.  Then it was quiet until about 3:30.  I thought we'd get hammered after work, but though we were busy, it wasn't hearly as bad as the morning.  (Could be there weren't too many voters left - over half our registered voters had voted by noon).
6. Give yourself plenty of time to vote absentee.  We had a number of voters who sent in absentee ballot request forms, but never received their ballots.  Some were mailed to the wrong address (in Cincinnati!), some never showed (like Madeline's). Those who lived in town could come in and vote a provisional ballot.  Folks out of town were screwed.

It was a long day.  Showed up at 5:30am, got home around 10:00pm.  I'll do it again.