Baltimore Fishbowl | What's it really like to work at the polls on Election Day? (2024)

This is precisely the kind of conversation a group of 20 or so people who have never met one another have when they get together for the first time. The rolling chairs were less a problem for me than an object of curiosity. It might be more of a problem, I think, for the several of us who arrived with the help of canes or walkers. The ease with which the chairs roll makes them easy to miss when you sit down, though nobody does. We just roll around a lot.

There’s another group of about 20 people in each of the rooms on either side of us, one where veteran Election Judges are getting a refresher course in how to use the electronic pollbooks, which log voters in to the voting system and generate Voter Authority Cards, and the other where people are learning the intricacies of the Ballot Marking Device, an electronic alternative to the low-tech fill-in-the-bubble-with-a-pen paper ballot.

According to the 300-page Election Judge Manual all of us prospective Election Judges have been given, we are to, on the one hand, let voters choose whichever method of voting they prefer, but on the other, make sure that at least 10 voters use the electronic method by 1:00 p.m. on primary day. This proves harder to do when an electronic machine breaks down. More on that later.

This makes 60 of us total in the training, and we are just one group of many in Baltimore County being trained. We’re not volunteers. In Maryland, Election Judges get paid $250 to work an election, and $50 for the training.

A 2016 report found that on the general election day that year there were more than 106,000 polling places in the U.S. Nearly a quarter of poll workers were age 71 or older, the study found, and another 34 percent were between 61 and 70. Many were likely retired, though many in our training group looked young enough that they were not.

Almost two-thirds of the people responsible for staffing these polling places said they had some problems doing so.

I’m not sure how I became a poll worker. The person who first called me about being one thanked me for signing up. I don’t remember signing up, though I probably did, and when she called I couldn’t think of a good reason why I couldn’t be a poll worker. So I said yes. I am one of those rare people who doesn’t exactly like being called for jury duty, either, but doesn’t try to get out of it.

I fit the demographic, sort of. I still work, though I am mostly retired from making real money. I am not among the oldest cohort of poll workers, though I fall in that 61-to-70 age group.

I asked the Election Program Assistant who first contacted me if it was okay if I wrote about the experience of being a poll worker. Each time, she forwarded my query to her supervisor. I never got a response. My self-imposed restrictions, therefore, are to write exclusively about the process of being a poll worker. I will advocate for no particular candidate or party, nor will I mention anyone’s name. I should add that all of my fellow poll workers with whom I discussed my plan to write about being a poll worker thought it was a good idea.

I have come around a full 360 degrees on how I feel about this process. When most people say that, what they mean is that they came around 180 degrees, to the opposite conclusion they went in with. I really mean 360 degrees. I went into it thinking it would be a great lesson in civic responsibility. I went through a time — post-training, pre-election — where I thought it would be a disaster. I came out of it thinking, once again, how it was a great lesson in civic responsibility.

Why did I think it would be a disaster? The training, even at three hours, felt rushed, and for me at least left something to be desired. The person demonstrating how to use the electronic marking devices, for example, repeatedly emphasized that we were not to touch voters’ ballots, then proceeded to do just that with the hypothetical ballot he used to demonstrate. This left me confused. When we were trained on the pollbooks, we managed to register just three hypothetical voters during our hour of training, and were told by our instructor what a great job we had done. Just three? Really? We would process nearly 500 people in the 12 hours of the actual primary election in May, or about 40 an hour. The November election figures to be even busier.

The manual we were each given has 14 chapters, plus appendices and a glossary, and clocks in at nearly 300 pages. I doubt that many trainees ever bothered reading the whole thing, let alone committing it to memory. On primary day, however, the manual was consulted frequently.

A few minutes before our training session was supposed to end (we went from 9:00 am to noon), one person asked if we would get out on time. Others seemed concerned about this as well. I had lost track of time, and didn’t feel the time crunch as acutely as some. Nor did I feel ready for election day.

On primary election day, May 14, I displayed a remarkable ability to break machines, or at least to work at machines that broke on their own while I was in charge of them. I started out helping voters who chose to vote using the Ballot Marking Device. We had two, and one stopped cooperating. No one was sure why, and after a reboot (necessitating the use of a password that one of our two Chief Election Judges managed to remember, though I did not), the machine started again, until it stopped, necessitating another reboot.

At one point a coworker, a veteran of many elections, suggested I work at other stations so I could learn about them. (He may have just been trying to get rid of me.) Anyway, around 1:00 p.m. I left the electronic voting machine and took a seat at the pollbook table, where I would log voters in and issue them their Voter Authority Cards. After a brief tutorial — courtesy of another veteran poll worker — I managed to check people in without difficulty, though I dreaded getting a problem person, who was unaffiliated with either of the two major political parties, or who didn’t show up in our system, or who the pollbook said had already voted, and who would be sent to the “provisional” ballot table, which meant that maybe his or her ballot would be counted, or maybe not. (More than once, we had to explain what provisional meant.)

The pollbook at which I sat crashed, or I broke it, or something. In any event, it stopped working, no matter how many times I poked it with my plastic stylus. It had to be shut down, given a rest, and then restarted. This happened twice. As far as I know, mine was the only pollbook to behave this way.

I watched across the room and experienced smug satisfaction when I saw two election workers struggling with one of the Ballot Marking Devices I had abandoned. Apparently the problem was that someone had shoved a pen cap in where the paper ballot is supposed to go. No one knew why anyone would think to do this, though theories abounded. Once the pen cap was dislodged, the injured machine completed the day without incident.

At one point someone at the pollbook station started circulating a document that said that 45 percent of poll workers felt unsafe doing their job. I asked around, and found no one in our group who felt unsafe, though I had earlier talked to a veteran poll worker who said that in the past he had encountered voters who were certain he was rigging things, or otherwise expressed doubts about the integrity of the process.

During the primary, we poll workers celebrated when appropriate, like when a first-time voter checked in and was subjected (with his or her permission) to a round of applause, given an American flag, and festooned with bling. The voters were cordial, and many expressed what seemed like heartfelt appreciation for our efforts. Our most gregarious poll worker gave out “I Voted” stickers and made all voters feel like a million bucks as they left.

We eventually decided that the document found at our station was too political or too biased, and had no business being near us. We threw it away.

So, what do I think of the process? On the negative side, poll workers in Baltimore County work a too-long day of at least 14 hours. The pay isn’t great — about $18.00 an hour, plus a little less than that for the training. And it’s a one-time or two-time gig, though the manual says our “term of office” is “approximately two years and ends thirteen weeks before the 2026 Gubernatorial Primary Election.” I found the training to leave something to be desired. The manual is too long to synthesize. There were all those rolling chairs.

And the pros? There were many. There’s nothing like actually being on the job. I learned more from actually doing things than I ever learned from the training, and even the training was done by well-meaning people for well-meaning people, so in that sense, it had much to recommend. More important than what I learned, I developed an affinity for my coworkers. We bonded, I think, or at least started to. We wore different hats and were a different bleary-eyed bunch when we finished than we were when we arrived that morning, bleary-eyed from waking up too early. Plus, how often do you get to spend the day around civic-minded people who take seriously their obligation to fulfill a civic need?

Were mistakes made? Probably. We are human, after all, and humans make mistakes. Was there fraud? Absolutely not. Fraud implies intent, and if there was any intent in our group, it was to fix problems, not cause them. We tried our best to fix broken machines and to iron out any discrepancies. I recall that as our total number of voters grew, some in our group obsessed over a difference of a fraction of a percent in our count.

By 8:30 pm, we had largely cleaned up and almost everybody was gone. The speed with which my coworkers had left had me reconsidering my thoughts about how well we’d bonded, but then, we’d been there since before 6:00 that morning, so maybe I should cut them some slack for bolting without even exchanging email addresses. Besides, we can do that in November.