From a tad-POLL to a toad.

I decided if I was going to comment on the process, I should have some sense of it, so I worked the polls for the primary. I must admit, after my training session, and meeting my precinct team on the Monday night beforehand, I was sure it would be a fiasco. Luckily all went well.

I worked the Ottawa Hills H.S. polling location, and yes I am well aware that more populated precincts were much busier and less staffed, but I was pleasantly surprised at how the system worked.

We had input from “seasoned” poll workers (many of whom apparently have been doing their civic duty since before I was born), we had team leaders called “presiding judges” to help us regular poll judges get by, and we all worked well as a team. As I mentioned; armed and educated by a three hour training session and a pre-primary night meeting at the polling location to set up the machines, we leaped feet first into the fray Tuesday morning at 6:00 a.m. I left the location at just after 8:00 p.m. in the freezing rain and sleet. A long but satisfying day.

I saw children with their parents to join in the “historic vote” on the democrat ticket. I saw 17 year old students who will be 18 in November, vote for the first time. I worked with one dedicated 17 year old high school student who was there for the day, not for the money, not because he was president of the young republicans at his school, and not because he had some required community service hours to complete, but simply because he wanted to learn and experience the system first hand.

The machines worked like a charm. For the skeptics paper ballots were available upon request. I debated the machine vs. paper with a co-worker on Wednesday. Reading about the “lost memory cards” she was convinced that the old way was more reliable. I argued (successfully I might add) that we have no idea how successful the old way was, because we were comfortably naive about lost ballots, missing ballots, discarded ballots, ballots dropped in the ocean, or uncounted absentee military ballots. Because of the accuracy and immediate results which are possible with electronic ballots we now KNOW MORE about lost votes and can react accordingly. And knowledge is power, even if it only leads to finger pointing and cries of voter interference and disenfranchisement.

Like DeWine said - not a single electronic machine ran out of paper ballots. Yes in Lucas County some memory cards containing the votes were missing for at time; but guess what - officials knew exactly how many memory cards, where they should have been, and where to look because the cards are a known number. Therefore they could find them, and as necessary - return to the proper machines and re-record the votes. VWALLA!!

Did we ever know when a bag, box, crate, pallet or truckload of paper ballots went missing in the good ole days? No. Because we could not know the accurate number of paper ballots cast across the hundreds of thousands of voters, OR, design out the human error factor in casting, collecting, and counting them, we simply never knew the total of lost or incorrectly cast ballots.

So despite my initial cynicism, I became a convinced believer in the system, the machines, and the process. A proud, long day well spent.

The A-Hole.

PS…..and I get paid!!!!!