Canadian Geese

 

Partisan Primary today w/ a kicker of two referendum.  Figured on a fair amount of spoiled ballots where people voted across parties but the poll workers giving out ballots were very succinct on how to read the ballot.  Only had two ballots I had to reissue because the voter made a mistake.  There were more ballots where the voter put an "x" on a candidate instead of filling in the circle in front of the candidate's name.  Those the machine caught w/ the "Ambiguous Mark" message.  I helped those voters out by explaining they just had to fill in the circle and they all were able to correct their ballots.  There was a fair amount of advertising about the referendum pros/cons so only a minimum amount of people asked what they meant.  The bigger issue for me was the number of voters.  Partisan primaries usually aren't a big draw.   I saw the county clerk had sent us 50 ballots when we did the Public Test - some of those were used for testing and some for absentees.  I was happy as I completely unpacked the tote yesterday to see she had included another pack of 100 ballots.  By noon though we already had 100 voters - way more than expected.  I texted the town clerk and asked if she could pick up more ballots at the county offices.  She arrived later w/ a packet of 45.   Fortunately, things slowed down a bit in the afternoon but we did have to open up that extra packet of 45 an hour before closing.   Closed the polls at 8 p.m.   I'd been working on paperwork most of the day but some had to wait until we had a vote count.  We all made it out of the Town Hall by 9:30.  It was a good day but I'm a little down.  Some voters still believe past elections have been stolen and if their candidate doesn't win in the presidential election it will be because it was stolen too.   Doesn't bode well for November.