The Day After the Election, 2020

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook, and those of you who were readers of this blog as far back as 2016, know that I work as a volunteer Election Officer (EO) for Fairfax County during the election seasons. I have found being on the inside of the administrative process of voting to be an amazing civic education, one that I have embraced as a calming influence in these times of partisan insanity.

My first participation as an EO took place in the 2106 election, and I've worked a large number of general and special elections since then. You may want to read (or re-read) my precinct-worker-level commentary on the 2016 election here ... my observations of the system as it worked yesterday are very similar, but with a few changes and updates. In case you're interested, here's my take on the 2020 election at my precinct - number 626 - in Fairfax County, Virginia ...

Most of us turned out at the local elementary school to set up the polling place on Monday afternoon before the election. Under the direction of our experienced Chief Officer, we set up all the tables and desks, ran and taped down all the extension cords, put up all the new plexiglass safety barricades, taped up the 53 acres of various legally-required signs, measured and taped out six-foot distance markers to safely space people who would be standing in line, etc, etc. We did everything we could do in advance, leaving the last hour before the polls opened on Tuesday morning free for the things we could only legally do at the last minute: unpack and set up all our machines, update voting lists, verify starting numbers, sign paperwork, and take the official oath.

We on the election staff had a show time of 5:00 AM on Tuesday, and when the doors opened at 6:00 there were a great many people in line. My first job of the day was checking people in using our electronic "poll pads" linked to the county voter registration database ... this allowed us immediately to identify voters who were in the wrong place or who had already requested and received an absentee ballot. At the start of the day, we knew from the database that 169 absentee ballots issued to voters in our precinct had not yet been returned. In the course of the day, about half of those had been brought in by voters who wanted to exchange them (unused) for a paper ballot they could mark and file on the spot ... there was clearly concern on the part of many that their mailed-in or dropped-off absentee ballots might be not received, not be processed, or challenged as somehow illegitimate.

As in 2016, nobody questioned having to provide an ID. In fact, many people (particularly newer citizens and first-time voters) simply dumped every bit of ID they had into the tray and invited us to take what we needed!

We only had one person who came in without a mask. He wasn't trying to make a statement ... he was in a hurry and had simply forgotten to put it on when he left his car. We allowed him to vote without comment, as we were forbidden to require anyone to wear a mask, but he was visibly embarrassed about being the only person in the place without one.

Contrary to what I had expected in such a bitterly contested election, we had only two partisan poll watchers show up, and both were pleasant, orderly, and unobtrusive, never trying to insert themselves into any of our activities or challenging any individual voters. In fact, I couldn't tell which party either one represented. All of us on the staff, of course, took our oaths to be totally nonpartisan very seriously, and no one could have made a case that we were other than scrupulously fair and honest.

All the setup and organizational work we'd done ahead of time paid off in a very smooth and almost completely glitch-free day. We got a great many compliments from voters about how well organized and efficient we were, which was great to hear.

Interested in the results? Here are the final figures for our precinct as we recorded them at the end of election day in 2016 and 2020:

2016: Clinton, 1461; Trump, 739. Total ballots recorded: 2372.

2020: Biden, 594; Trump, 483. Total ballots recorded: 1114.

The total number of votes at the end of the day was about half of what we recorded in 2016, mainly as a function of the enormous turnout for early voting; thus, we won't know what the actual results for our precinct are until the early/absentee votes are tabulated and added to the totals. Plenty of time for drinking yet!

One last comment ... in the course of a very long day (5:00 AM to 8:45 PM) we had only a few minor complaints from disgruntled voters, almost all of them dealing with either directional signs or the accommodations we had to make for social distancing and hygiene. But the one HUGE complaint we heard over and over, all day long, was that we weren't handing out the traditional "I Voted!" stickers and the even-more-popular "Future Voter" stickers for children. Someone up the chain decided that the amount of handling and interpersonal contact involved in handing them out represented an unacceptable health hazard in the era of Covid-19. I think that's sad.

So those were my basic observations on the 2020 election. It was a long day, but I'm glad I did it. If nothing else, it gave me a day isolated from the constant bombardment of partisan political advertising in our resolutely non-partisan bubble!

Have a good day. If you didn't vote, shame on you; if you did vote, I hope it was for the right person and for the right reasons.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo