Pt I: What I Saw as an Election Pollworker

11.6 | The Morning After

I was up early, had to be in the car by 7:15 to head out for an appointment. Not anticipating how profoundly reality could change in 24 hours, I had scheduled a doctor’s exam first thing the day after the 2024 General Election. Exams always engender a feeling of vulnerability, and I was already half out of my senses from the fatigue of the day before – 16 hours pollworking – one of thousands needed in my city alone to carry out this democratic rite.

Sliding my thumb to unlock the home screen on my phone, I took in the overnight reporting in a particularly tender state.

Just like 8 years ago, the news sent me tumbling into disorientation. My mind scrambled. It became a challenge to figure out the sequence of dressing myself. I poured a cup of coffee and then couldn’t find it anywhere, darting from room to room. I live in a small house — 1300 sq. ft. — not a whole lot of room to misplace something and find it impossible to relocate. Again, incomprehensibly, we were going to have to suffer four years of a dangerous, deluded man at the pinnacle of power.

I suppose this time the election results were not the complete shock that they were in 2016. The nation had already proven what it was capable of absorbing and overlooking. But also, I had gotten an insight into the voting public the day before, and what I witnessed was an underprepared electorate.

11.5 | Election Day, Morning

I was assigned to a polling center in Pleasant Grove, at a school in a working class area in far southeast Dallas with higher rates of crime and poverty than in other parts of the city. It was a hike to get there, but I didn’t mind the drive.

I clocked in with the judge and took my position with the four other clerks: two African-American women, election stalwarts. The system functions thanks to women like them. Then there were two young Latina women, super-smart magnet high schoolers ambitious enough to sign up for a full day’s work when they weren’t even old enough to vote. And me.

With fewer than 20 voters per hour for the first 7 hours of our shift, we felt way over-staffed, but I liked my colleagues. We were a good team, a little sisterhood of conscientious citizens carrying out the work of democracy. Sitting in between the two young women, so quick and competent, so fresh-eyed, I mostly chatted with them as they processed the voters coming through. They did allow me a couple of turns at the post, instructing and correcting me in each step of authenticating voters and preparing ballots.

“Scan the barcode. Now, write their name here. This number, not that one,” as I started to copy down the wrong string of digits into our records.

“You girls are so smart,” I said, the auntie that I am to teenaged girls. They reminded me of my nieces.

Eventually they simply took the reins, and I slid back in my chair to read. The number of voters seemed concerningly small, but everything was running smoothly, and I felt optimistic alongside these capable young women. They are our future, I thought, and I felt proud and ready for them to take active roles shaping society.

11.5 | Afternoon

As we crept into the afternoon in what felt like the longest day of our lives, the situation turned into a different ballgame altogether. As 2:30 hit, so did wave after wave of voters. Suddenly we went from too many workers to too few.

As the people streamed through, I got a full, frontal encounter with a slice of the American electorate, and I grew increasingly concerned.

First, there seemed a high rate of abnormalities. Voters who presented their identification but didn’t know their eligibility depended on registration. Voters who were registered but did not appear on the rolls. Voters who presented alternative forms of ID, voters without IDs, voters whose registration was not active, voters whose information was inconsistent – each one requiring detailed due diligence to track them down in the system. Not wanting to turn anyone away without cause, the patient clerks muscled through the bureaucratic process. Soon the voter hotline was overloaded. Over an hour’s wait to talk to a higher-up who could help.

Then there were logistical limitations, the system creaking under the weight of demand. The City had inadvisably put 21 local governance propositions on the ballot, all written in dense technocratic jargon. Most voters were showing up to vote for their preferred presidential candidate, running headlong unawares into this morass in the second half of the ballot. Most stood there at the polling machines, reading each proposition quite obviously for the first time – each voter taking 15 or 20 minutes, some up to half an hour to read and make selections.

We only had 5 voting stations, with two glitching in and out of service, either slipping offline or eating ballots and needing repeated restarts. The line backed up further and further. Wait times extended to an hour and more. The super smart high school girls fielded requests for Spanish translation like heroines, but the tone-deafness of loading up the ballot in what was clearly a high-turnout election increasingly irritated me.

Some people simply could not stand that long on the sloping floor of a school auditorium. Seating them at the front, I stood their place in line as surrogate. This pinch-hitting identified me as “helper,” and as we ramped up into high gear my role morphed from clerk back-bencher to mobility-impaired assistant, to all-purpose voter aide. In this role I received privileged insight into how voters were negotiating the process.

11.5 | Nightfall

The voting process can feel impersonal and bureaucratic, but it’s humans who make it work and humans who cast ballots. My heart went out to each of my fellow citizens who asked for help.

Some motioned me over to show them how to select candidates on a touch screen. Others didn’t know how to insert a ballot or that you even needed one, and one young woman asked which of her cards to insert into the ballot intake slot (“slot” signifying “payment”). Quite a few got caught up in loops at the end, trying to find their way out of the maze of screens presenting options to edit selections, hitting back buttons and forward buttons and completely losing their orientation.

I approached one woman nearly in tears. “I don’t know anything about politics. I just don’t want to mess up,” she confided in a desperate whisper. “I can’t understand any of this.” She asked me to read the propositions silently to myself and summarize to her in plain English. It took real courage for her to show up. It seemed that making her mark wasn’t a right she felt entitled to so much as a responsibility she felt overwhelmed by and unprepared for.

It got worse and worse. Some voted randomly and scattershot. Made their presidential pick and skipped large swaths, landing on this race or that, and selecting what seemed to me like pure shots in the dark, as if crapshoot guesses on a multiple choice test you haven’t studied for. Highlighting a few fields and calling it quits.

These were vulnerable people I instinctively cared for, but time and time again, I was pained to escort someone through the process without bias, only to feel betrayed by their choices. Were they even aware of how to choose a candidate who aligned with their needs?

I was obligated to stand witness as they not only put themselves in greater jeopardy but me – all of us.

As the sun began to set, over 12 hours into my workday, my energy and patience wore thin. I wanted to hiss: “WTF are you thinking?? Do you need food stamps, subsidized healthcare? Do you want civil rights protections, a chance at higher pay? Do you know these people want to take that away from you!?”

I wanted to weep. But I had to wait.

What does the future hold?

I wonder poverty does to you as a voter? These are salt of the earth, hardworking, good-hearted people. I sensed it talking with them as they waited their turn in line. The conditions were trying, and they endured with quiet resolve. They showed up. There was a cost – time and energy they needed more for other things. But they followed through.

Nonetheless I wondered, had trustworthy news become a luxury for a class of people with the time and discrimination to access it? Had analyzing a political argument become a relic of the past? Have facts become unrecognizable…irrelevant? Do we still appreciate the real power of the vote? Are we sliding into complacency and taking it for granted?

On one hand, what I witnessed inspired me: people of every race, gender, background exercising the franchise. First time voters with the courage to do something unfamiliar. Spanish-only voters brave enough to engage in a process designed for English speakers. Even one who had gone through the prison system and paid his debt to society stepped up with the temerity to reclaim his rights as a full citizen. Some who had not voted in over a decade made the decision to participate in this civic ritual. This thrilled me.

On the other hand, what I saw over the course of the day was not the behavior envisioned in founding ideals.

We still have so far to go in this whole enterprise of ‘forming a more perfect Union.’

We have rules that impose more burden than is necessary to get a ballot. Onerous bureaucracy. News that corrupts, misleads, divides. Burdens of survival that usurp the time and energy needed to engage in the democratic process.

By the time the day was over, I couldn’t wait to get to my car. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold back the tears. I was so demoralized – can the aggregate sustain so much random and ill-informed voting? What will we end up doing to ourselves?

I was ashamed that a community could be so neglected, and I recognized my ignorance as part of the problem. I can go about my life largely ignorant of the plight of large swaths of people in my city who were just trying to get by. I drove home dispirited, a gnawing ache in my gut. I let myself into a quiet house and went straight to bed. I already knew what to expect by daybreak.