Walk into any election polling place anywhere in the country and one thing is consistently true: There’s a gaggle of gray-haired women — adhesive name tags on their shirts — precisely organizing unvoted ballots, paper signs, pens, giant notebooks and binders. They’ve placed their seat cushions just so on the rickety chairs they’ll sit on for upwards of 14 hours and their snack totes are in reach.
I’m one of them. I’ve been fascinated by poll workers since I first voted back in the 1970s. I promised myself that when I was a gray-haired old lady I’d join them. I’ve worked Precinct 7 at the Moose Lodge on Eisenhower for years. On Tuesday I joined my fellow workers at 6 a.m. to set up the room, tape up the signs, square away the paper ballots, activate the electronic voter sign-in machines and the electronic tabulators and take the oath in which we promise to do the right things.
At 7 a.m., we opened the door with one goal: Ensure your vote counts.
Few voters get the chance to see how elections work behind the scenes. As a journalist I watched — and waited for hours — as election workers counted ballots by hand, posting results on huge paper sheets taped to walls. I celebrated the introduction of electronically tabulated ballots because it was more accurate and quicker than hand counting.
Poll workers ensure voting integrity
At every step along the way, there are backups and fail-safes. Nothing happens without a double check by at least one other person. We reconcile numbers of voters with numbers on the tabulation machines. We lock the machines, we seal voted ballots and multiple poll workers verify that process — and sign our names to multiple certification forms. If something goes awry, say a power failure or a recalcitrant machine, everything stops until it’s fixed. There are backup plans for backup plans.
We are a well-trained group. None of us would be poll workers if we didn’t believe in free and fair elections. We don’t care who the elected supervisor of elections is because we know we are a solid bridge between your vote and the politicians. We are registered Democrats, Republicans and NPAs (No Party Affiliation). We certainly don’t do it for the pay. Yes, in Florida, we get paid. Exactly enough to maybe fund a happy hour.
So last week when local “election experts” took to social media in a frothing frenzy about fax lines, copper wire and voting fraud, I didn’t know whether to belly laugh or be aggrieved at the insults to poll workers.
It started with a news release from Supervisor of Elections Sherri Hodies that said election results would be delayed on Tuesday because precincts wouldn’t be able to transmit data electronically from the precinct tabulators to the main database. That’s because at polling locations around the city the old, hard-wired copper phone lines used for secure transmission are falling apart and no longer reliable. I know this one first hand because the landline at the Moose Lodge has been iffy for years.
Instead, when polls close at 7 p.m., and the electronic tabulators are securely locked down, the drives with that voting data would be driven immediately by two poll workers from each precinct to the office on Stock Island (or Marathon and Key Largo) and securely uploaded there. That’s how we’ve done it in the past when there were challenges with those landlines.
Hodies called them fax lines and that sent folks into a tizzy with visions of hundreds of paper ballots being fed into a museum-quality fax machine. Uh. No. Same folks opined on how poll workers should just upload to the cloud using wireless or fiber-optic technology. Uh. No. Not unless you want to tempt hackers to exploit the data.
About the only thing that could happen is a wreck that delays getting the secure data to the main offices. And if the worst happens? Well, there are those sealed, witnessed and verified paper ballots, which are transported separately, ready to be counted by hand.
By the November general election, the county will have a new transmission system that uses digital modem technology and runs on a closed-loop system that has no internet connection.
So cool your angst. My poll worker buddies and I got you covered. Or you could join us in November. You’d be trading your comfy, online warrior keyboard for a chance to be on the inside of this amazing process — and you wouldn’t post such social media nonsense.
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