Polling Practice

I feel young!

Yesterday I attended the county's training class for election day poll workers. It was held in the shiny new home for the board of elections on the second floor of an office park building. Nearly the entire floor is an enormous open room lined in glass windows, so anyone can look in and see that there is no mischief going on when votes are counted. We were shuffled off to a conference room in back. There were about 25 people in attendance...and 3 of us were under the age of 50. A couple more were under the age of 60. The majority of the room appeared to be between 70 years old and death. Lots of sweat suits in bright colors with floral appliqués on them.

Anyway, I sat near the back of the room, next to 70-someting Mrs Chow who slept for nearly the entire 4 hour class. (I think she's done this before) We were instructed by two seasoned election officials, Doug and Dave. Doug was very flamboyant and silly and Dave was more serious. The first thing out of their mouths, the BIG rule: ON ELECTION DAY, EVERYONE IS NEUTRAL. NO POLITICAL COMMENTS. OK...got it.

The (very long) 4 hour class instructed us on the operations of elections - the poll books, the types of ballots used (in Washington state, you get your choice of paper ballot (to be fed into an Accu-Vote machine) or electronic computer voting (and there IS a paper trail of the votes - but I don't know how they'd compare it to the actual vote...it might just verify what the machine registered). We learned how to set up the polling place during the day and the proper way to hang the American flag. We also watched a film about dealing with people with disabilities. Very informative and not at all "giggle inducing", as I had secretly hoped.

Everybody in the room appeared very serious about having safe and fair elections. A couple of the old coots even used the phrase "voter disenfranchisement". It seems I wasn't the only voters' rights advocate in attendance! We were shown how to safely and securely transport the ballots at the end of the day and even got to practice on the special locked bags with their red security tags. Even Mrs. Chow woke up for this part.

At least from the polling place side of things, the votes will be secure.

But, I still have a sinking feeling in my stomach. No matter how secure the voting is, they are still counted by the "Black Box" machines. (known as Accu-Vote - made by the Diebold company who has recently changed its name to Premier Voting Systems due to bad press, I guess) We were shown how the memory chips in the machines were sealed and protected and could only be removed at a central location to be counted. But, I still wonder who programmed the chips in the first place?

I don't think being a polling place worker will ease my fears about hacked elections. Perhaps I should just not stress over it and take a nap, like Mrs. Chow.