Town Clerk Chris put a notice on the town website that she would be at the Town Hall from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today for anyone who wanted to vote early. Normally there is only a handful, if any, of 'in-person absentee' voters (as they are referred to up here). They occurred when someone realized that they would be out-of-town/busy on election day and it was too late to request an absentee ballot. Early voting is being pushed this year (I don't get why) and Chris wanted to make sure people could vote early if that made them feel more comfortable. I told her I would be at the Town Hall w/ her. I could check voter's ID, that they were already registered, and help fill out the top part of the absentee envelope for them. Personally, I wanted to watch her back in case someone let election fervor get the best of them. When I arrived, Chris told me she had woken in a sweat this morning after a dream that she didn't have enough absentee envelopes for everyone who would show up today. If this early-voting becomes 'a thing' will have to work on streamlining the process for future elections to take some stress off her. No one showed up for the first half hour so we kept busy by cleaning the toilets, vacuuming flies up, and checking if some of the last registrations had made it into the poll book. Then people began to arrive. Everyone was calm and glad to have this chance to get voting out of the way. There were a couple who spoke of videos they had seen of election tampering and Chris nicely let them know those videos weren't real. Funny, her statements to the contrary didn't seem to phase them. They just kept talking about stuff they had seen on the Internet as if Chris hadn't said anything. Some of the Town Board members popped in - to check if everything was going OK. Maybe everyone is stressed out: the doomsday rhetoric of the candidates, the conspiracy theories of a stolen election, the media jumping on every minutia of the election. I'm going to need a vacation after this one.
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