Elections: A study in teamwork

If Washington politicians want a lesson in how people from different parties can work together for the common good, they ought to visit Boone County during an election.

As a first-time election worker last week, I was struck by how well the system worked at the polls. Republicans and Democrats had a job to do, and we worked together to get it done with good humor and very little rancor.

Most importantly, the food was great. Election workers, it turns out, put football tailgaters to shame, and they are experts at making good food that percolates all day in crock pots. (The only downside to the fare is that many of the crockpot dishes are based on beans; I had to turn those down so that I would not perform a one-man rendition of the infamous chuckwagon scene from Blazing Saddles.)

I was designated a trouble-shooter, shuttling between New Haven Elementary School and New Horizons Methodist Church in the southeast part of town and making sure the new electronic voting machines worked correctly. My two machines worked well throughout the morning, and I began to wonder whether I was really earning my pay.

Contrary to popular myth, the I-Vote electronic machines made by Diebold appear to work relatively well. The vast majority of voters in my two precincts chose not to use them, mainly because turnout was heavy and each polling place had only one machine. My precincts had a 1 percent usage rate at most, but several voters who used the machines said they preferred them to paper.

Disabled voters appeared to like the electronic machines. The machines allow blind voters, for example, to get audio ballots. One blind voter did complain that the speaker on the audio ballot spoke too slowly, but perhaps later models will improve on that.

As a newly trained trouble-shooter, my first duty was to make sure the paper trail was complete for one of the largest elections in history, which, when I thought about it, was a frightening responsibility. Would I rise to the occasion when the time came to change the paper roll in the machine? Would I be the one to make the mistake upon which control of the U.S. Senate would depend?

I know it sounds a bit maudlin, but changing the paper on these machines is not an easy procedure. While I had practiced it during my training session, any good football coach will tell you that practice is not the same as a game.

So, after a quiet morning during which I tried to make myself useful to the other poll workers, it was about time to change my first print roll. Just as I was asking the judges to let me break the tape seal on the back panel, I got a frantic call on my cell phone from my other polling place. Their machine was locked up and chirping uncontrollably, they told me.

I quickly hopped in my Batmobile and headed over to New Haven grade school at top speed, a crusader with three hours of training under my belt, to save the day. Consulting with Wendy Noren on the phone, we decided I needed to reset the machine. Fortunately, I had asked her to show me where the reset button was located earlier that morning because a more experienced troubleshooter had mentioned I ought to know where it was.

The reset button is under a small sliding panel at the top of the machine where the memory card is also located, under a numbered wire seal that requires an act of Congress to break. Two judges, Republican and Democrat, had to watch me cut the seal and replace it after I was done, carefully noting the numbers on each seal.

But my reset stopped the chirping, and therefore I was a hero to the other electioneers. In my absence, they had almost hired some gradeschoolers to scrape their fingernails on a blackboard—just for relief from the non-stop chirping.

So I headed back to change that first print roll at New Horizons Methodist Church. I called the two judges over to watch as I cut the seal on the back of the machine, and I went to work. Putting aside a moment of panic as I realized the new spools coming out of the packaging did not look exactly like those we had used in practice or the one I was replacing inside the machine, I silently figured it out, worried that I looked like an idiot to the rest of the team.

Finishing the job, I shut the panel on the back of the machine, re-sealed it and said a silent prayer. Fortunately, I decided to stay until someone voted on the machine just to make sure everything was O.K. It turned out it wasn’t. That first voter on the new roll said something was wrong; the machine didn’t seem to be printing out his votes as he made them.

I could see he was right, so I had to ask the judges to come over and let me break the seal again. Somehow, the machine had sucked the paper back in upon itself, clogging up the works. I may have left too much slack in the paper, may not have put enough turns of paper onto the take-up spool or may have put the gear to the spool on the wrong side. Of course, I prefer to think it was all the @#$% machine’s fault. Anyway, my embarrassment aside, the machine worked fine after that, and the voter was a good sport. He told me he was a computer technician and was interested in how the system worked, so we both learned a valuable lesson in the realities of our new, post-2000 democracy.

After that, the day continued without major incident. I liked the M100 vote-counting machines, big gray voting boxes, each with a scanner on top. Even though cartoonists have drawn them to look like monsters with vote-shredding teeth, they really are helpful devices. When a voter accidentally double-votes, they catch the mistake and allow the voter to choose whether to continue or spoil the ballot and start over. And they won’t bite you as long as you stroke them and speak kindly every few minutes.

Finally, for voters, in the future please cut your election workers a break if they seem a little surly toward evening. Many of them have been up working for democracy since 4:30 a.m. And they have been ingesting beans all day.