Hedge Bindweed

 

Partisan Primary Election.  Got to the Town Hall around 6:15 a.m.  Polls open at 7:00 a.m. and we had someone waiting about that time to vote before taking off for work.  Figuring this might be the calmest portion of the day we went through all of the absentees.  After that it was a fairly steady stream of voters.  No lines to speak of (the beauty of voting in a rural area).  The ballot was a little complicated in that it contained candidates for all five parties and people couldn't cross over to vote in more than one party.  I thought I would have to spoil ballots because of overvoting but whenever the machine caught a case, the voter and I found a way to get their vote recorded correctly.   After each big group of people I would check that the number of voters in the two poll books matched the machine's count.  Obviously the number of voters and the number of ballots cast should always match.  In the afternoon around 3, after a group of voters left, we found that one of the poll books numbering was off by a lot.  The machine and the other poll book counts matched.  Since they had matched less than a half hour earlier the two people on the poll books backtracked to find where the numbers had gone wrong.  To count voters in the poll books  each person on a poll book is given a pad of sticky numbers.  As each voter comes in the two people pull the next number off their individual pads and affix it next to the voter's name.  The County provides the pad of numbers and somehow they had stuck a page of duplicate numbers in one of the pads.    The poll worker threw out the duplicated page of numbers, removed the bad numbers affixed already in his book, and put the numbers from the correct page in their place.   Whenever there is an anomaly in the voting I write it in the Inspector's Statement. (in duplicate).    Poll Worker Carla wanted me to write that we had to resuscitate Chief Inspector Andy who went into shock w/ the numbers being so wildly off.   Andy wanted to me to write it up that we had to suspend voting while the Chief Inspector went home to change his shorts.  I opted for something more bland.

I got home around 9:30 p.m.  Hadn't realized how sore my legs and back were.  Looking forward to bed.