Hello friends and readers, as you may or may not know, I have been working for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners training college students to serve as Polling Place Administrators (PPAs) on election day. The city of Chicago obtained new touchscreen voting machines by mandate from the passage of HAVA (Help America Vote Act) requiring that there be a way for people with certain dissabilities (blind, quadrapalegic) would be able to vote with privacy and without assistance at the polling place on election day.
Anyway we got a bunch of those new machines, and the Judges of Election (the folks that run the polling places) had TONS of problems running and using the machines during the March primaries. The board or elections decided that something had to be done to save their jobs and make the elections run smoother. Their solution was to recruite and train 2000 college kids to be there and know how to setup and run and troubleshoot the voting machines.
Well as you can see by this handy graphic from the Chicago Tribune , there was a marked improvement between these elections and the primaries in March: So as you can CLEARLY see from that graphic, my friends and I single handedly saved many people their jobs and helped this election to go forth successfully.
We spent election day (from 5:00am until 10:00pm) answering call after call taking down complaints from voters, and helping judges and PPAs solve problems. Some of the more comical calls we recieved (comically scary maybe) were from judges wondering when we were going to be bringing them coffee and donuts (sorry we don’t provide) or wondering why there was not a television included in their equipment so they could watch their training video to learn how to run a polling place (yikes!).
The majority were about little problems with machines where we would talk them through how to change the paper, get out a stuck voter card, help them realize that the machine is in fact unplugged and that is why it won’t work, and generally run them through the simple procedures they had been trained and were outlined in their handbook they should have had with them. There were a few calls from frustrated voters about judges who were generally disrespectful and had an obvious disregard for the election process and the voters privacy. For those we sent out investigators to hopefully smack some common sense and respect into these people.
It was my first election that I worked, and I think everything went pretty well. Our boss was very happy with the work that we did, and asked if we were interesed in doing this again in January for the next elections. Only thing I need now is to finally recieve the crapload of money that they owe me, this elusive check that is mysteriously floating around the county building just out of reach. I will call tomorrow and they will probably just tell me “Friday at the LATEST”, which is what we heard last week, and the week before, and the week before, and the… sigh.