03 May, 2006

Back, and none the worse for wear

I recommend that if you have to get up at 4:00 to put in a 16 hour day, by all means try to lay in bed awake from 11:00 until almost 1:00. ;-) It sure worked for me.

Not much to say. We got 223 voters through our machines in 13 hours of the ~750 in our precinct. Over 30% turnout for a midterm primary with no issues on the ballot is respectable. The new machines worked well. Only 2 or 3 people really hated them.

Being a presiding judge was interesting. It's only the second time I've ever worked the polls, and 3 of the 4 judges I was overseeing had a combined 70 years of experience or some such. It was vaguely unsettling to have them waiting for me to come back from the bathroom to figure out how to handle a provisional voter. They seemed to be happy all day, though, and I don't think anything went badly wrong. One of the judges said her buddy quit because of the last pj, and she was glad that she had decided to give it one more year, so that was cool.

Besides, we closed out our polls 5 minutes faster than the other precinct set up in the same room. That's how they really judge you. :-D After 13 hours of voter processing, they only care how quickly you can get them home.

It was fun. It wasn't a "rush" like back in 2004, when we had lines stacked out the doors for fully 14 hours, but it was pretty wild being "in charge".

And I got some reading done in "Ante Pacem". The man makes me think!

1 comment:

Milly said...

I'm glad you had fun.

I get the sleep thing when I work days I have to be up at 4:30 am and nights I'm off at 10 pm unless like last night I stayed over to do some stuff. I got home, ate, filled out paper work due today. (Got it a month ago.) Looked at this computer. Then tried to sleep to be up at 6:50. Sleep, we don't need no stink'n sleep.