Being a Poll Worker on Election Day 2020

Nobody knows how long we'll be sitting for. We're told, "there's been a delay." We never know anything more. By the end of the 4.5 hours, I'm livid. The flip has officially been switched. Thousands of polling stations were set up without my help. Voters are voting. I studied the set up portion of the manual to watch it all fade away for nothing. I'm furious over the inefficiency of our government. Also, how is it possible that people on standby could sit for 4.5 hours and still be sent home? Could we not have been called when needed from the comfort of our homes, especially during a pandemic?

This example of our government inefficiency is a rough patch... I'll give it another shot.

They have a worker distribute papers row by row, but the workers only have about 40 papers in their hand at all times and there are hundreds of people in this room. The workers have to go back to their stations and get more papers every time they run out. Why can't they just carry a larger batch of paper so they don't have to go back and keep refilling their supply as often? No one knows. But they keep forgetting the place where they stopped so they keep missing people. More workers come around with a blow horn and ask people to raise their hands if they don't have the handout. The hands keep coming up. Nothing changes. #merica

Midway through waiting, I'm so bored I get up to go to the bathroom because at this point, it sounds like a fun excursion. On my way there, a worker says through his blow horn "the ladies bathroom will be closed for 15 minutes." Since I'm already closer to the restrooms than my seat, I head to the bathroom to wait in line. Upon getting there, the bathroom guard says there is an open bathroom in another conference room a floor below us. The girls line heads to the entrance of the conference room to ask to leave, where another guard says those bathrooms are closed, even though we were just told they were open by the first guard. The first guard is called over so both male guards can debate over whether the woman's bathroom is open or not. My group of women are eventually all sent back to the original restrooms where a new line of women have formed and tell us to go to the back of the line because they were there first (or so they thought).

11 A.M. Washington Heights - The Alianza Dominicana Triangle Building

I arrive at my polling site where the people at the front door look confused by the arrival of 3 standby poll workers. "Okay... so, you're not here to vote then?"

I had been in this area once before. Shortly after moving to New York, I biked to the George Washington Bridge from the Upper West Side and had stopped near there for food. It felt so relieving to see restaurants owned by people of color, Mexican food, Dominican food, Puerto Rican food—for the love of God, beans! It was good to be back and surrounded by people who looked like me. I felt more at ease than I did in the location of my own apartment.

I kept thinking about how much more comfortable I'd be if I moved from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights, a city that's 62% Hispanic. How pleasant it would be to see people who look like me shopping in the grocery store instead of cleaning my apartment building or cooking and serving the food at the restaurants near my apartment. I think about how people would comment on how backwards of a move it would seem like I'm making by moving there. How backwards thinking it is to think that move is backwards just because I'm moving to a lower income, more minority populated area. What if that's where I feel the most me? I argue with my haters in my head.

11:20 A.M.

I'm signed in and assigned a made up job because all the real ones are taken—to help direct voters from the privacy booths to the ballot scanner. There is about a 6 foot distance between the two. They are next to each other.

11:45 A.M.

I'm asked by one of the leads if I want to sit down because "everyone seemed to be finding the ballot scanner just fine before you got here." The polling station lead, a black woman with a colorful bomber jacket and 7 election years of experience, proceeded to sit and vent with the other poll workers who were sitting around. She speaks of the utter stupidity of people who year after year are unable to properly fill out a ballot without making some sort of checkmark on the ballot. She speaks eagerly and anxiously about what Donald Trump has done to our country. She brought up his taxes, his ridiculous lies, his even more ridiculous hair (her words, not mine), and delays in addressing the Coronavirus. Her rant of frustration grew in volume and by the end, she was quietly screaming. After all this, she takes a brief pause, looks down and nervously says "Wait… you're all Democrats right?"

Remember when you didn't get along with a sibling, but your mom already reached the point where she didn't care anymore so you had to work it out yourselves—together? Well, if you're a poll worker, you have to be accompanied by someone from the opposite party in everything you do. If you're answering a question from a voter, you must go together. If you're checking in a voter, you must check them in together. It's forced unity at it's finest, and it kind of works? In my personal life, I have a tendency to surround myself with like minded people... Democrats specifically (when I have the choice). I found out about this poll working rule when I took the training class and I was deeply concerned with what it would be like, tethered to someone with almost completely opposite values as mine. Perhaps at one point in history, the divide wasn't as vast, but that's simply not the case now. I ended up working with one Black and one Latina Republican. Despite being in such a political situation, politics never came up with them and it seemed a little late to try to persuade. At best, working with them humanized the "other" for me. At worst, I thought they had a bad attitude.

7:00 P.M.

I have a real job. I sit in for the poll workers who check in voters, but like taking lots of breaks. I work with a republican who explains how to fill out the ballots by saying "Did you go to kindergarten? Then you know how to fill in these bubbles." Which is interesting because I don't think most people fill out standardized test bubbles in kinder, but technically I wouldn't know because I was homeschooled so in my case, kinder wasn't as helpful for this situation as my partner thought.

Throughout the course of the day, there were many Spanish speakers who immediately looked at me and started speaking Spanish. Sometimes if their questions were simple, I could answer them, but the majority of the time I pathetically called an interpreter over. I'm fluent in American Sign Language, which didn't come in handy at any point in the day, and hasn't at any point this year (or the few before).

Once, an older Latino gentleman helped by another poll worker across the room got flustered that the interpreter was helping someone else and that nobody else could help him. His comments attracted a few glances because it disrupted the general mood of the room. He looked angrily around the room and it was at that point, I knew what was going to happen. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me, stomped over to me, and said absolutely nothing. He just looked at me, waiting for me to say something, anything in Spanish, to offer my help. I had never, in my life, felt more helplessly disappointed in myself.

8:45 PM

The puzzle pieces come together. We had another older Latino voter—Jesus. Super rare, I know. But what was unique (or so I thought) about him was that he signed his signature "J E S U S" in uppercase, non italicized letters. The first time I saw that, I was taken aback and asked him to sign his full signature. He said he understood, but the second time, he just repeated that same print. What seemed to me to be a mistake was intentional. I thought it was odd, until it happened about ten more times with the same demographic.

Why is it that many members of our older Latino generation don't have a proper signature? Why is it that we rely on cursive, an outdated form of writing, to represent something as important as our identity? This makes even less sense when there are older generations that placed more of an emphasis on working than and building a life than on ...cursive. But this difference, as small as it seems, it differentiates you. And even when legally able to vote, but there isn't anyone to help you do so in your native language, this differentiates you. When you haven't had the opportunity to take standardized tests so filling out ballot bubbles isn't blindingly obvious, it differentiates you. Feeling underrepresented in one burrow, but overrepresented in another, these are differentiators that don't seem major in isolation, but add up.

9:30 P.M.

We all clean up our stations and we are at the mercy of the Coordinator to dismiss us all as a group. Although he seemed fairly jolly the whole day, by the end he is thoroughly peeved at our anxiousness to leave. This comes to a breaking point when he makes an announcement. He speaks softly, because everyone's stillness creates nothing to compete with. He speaks incredibly and purposefully slowly, to make it clear our time is his "If you all stop. asking me. stupid. questions. we can get out of here. sooner." The crowd of poll workers look at each other in infuriated understanding and I can't help but crack a smile at the audacity.

10:20 P.M.

I get home, undecided on whether I am incredibly un/impressed with the day.

Now:

I'm pretty sure I just got a crash course in adulting. And $100 bucks.