At last.
The election is over.
No more robocalls.
No more ads.
No more election slingers that go straight from the mailbox to the recycle bin.
Whew.
After sixteen hours at the polls, this election inspector is worn out. But it’s been quite a day.
At the end, it felt like sleepwalking. In fact, my memories are already starting to fade…I was in a building with two election districts. Altogether, we should have had eight election inspectors: four for each district. Instead, we had five altogether. And, oddly enough, we ended up with four Democrats and one Republican. Mack, our sole Republican inspector, said that, at eight o’clock last night, he was called and asked if he had any Republican friends who would like to work at the polls.
Well, wasn’t that bizarre? Grand Island has more Republicans than Democrats. And, to make it even more odd, one of our inspectors reported that her daughters had been called in to work at one of the other districts. Then, last night, she was told that she wasn’t needed. She is a registered Republican.
We were definitely short handed. But that wasn’t as bad as one district in Buffalo.
It had one election inspector.
The poor single election inspector couldn’t even open the polls. The requirement is for two election inspectors to open the polls. The preferred choice is one Democrat and one Republican.
That election district never opened.
I don’t know where the inspector went.
We were definitely short handed. But that wasn’t as bad as one district in Buffalo.
It had one election inspector.
The poor single election inspector couldn’t even open the polls. The requirement is for two election inspectors to open the polls. The preferred choice is one Democrat and one Republican.
That election district never opened.
I don’t know where the inspector went.
Go figure.
What else happened?
We were super busy all day.
That meant strange times for meals.
I had lunch at ten o’clock in the morning and dinner at 2:30 p.m.
All sorts of goofy things happened.
I found a campaign slinger at a “privacy booth.” No campaigning in the polling place. The slinger was placed in the appropriate receptacle.
People seemed confused. One man came in to vote. He showed me his voter registration card. It said that he was registered to vote in Buffalo. I suggested that he go there. He said that he thought that he could just go anywhere to vote.
Um. No.
There were a few who needed to be directed to other districts in Grand Island. But only one Buffalo guy.
The voting machine for district two jammed. It seemed to have the voting machine equivalent of indigestion. It stayed out of commission for quite some time. The voters had to put their ballots into the emergency bin. They seemed confused. They wanted to know if their ballots were going to count. Well, yes. After the machine is fixed.
Apparently, people get used to things being done in a certain way. Move anything around and they get confused. The sign in tables were not in the expected places. The district two table was in the space that district eleven usually occupies and vice versa. People got confused by that.
People were asking for the “I voted” stickers but we didn’t have any of those.
We used to have a “kids voting” project, which was good because the kids got their parents to vote, but no more “kids voting.” I don’t know what happened to that.
We love our town supervisor, Mary Cooke! She brings us baked goods! The cookies that she brought were scrumptious!
The propositions were confusing.
It was good to see friends and neighbors.
And now it’s all over.
Until next year.
