24

...more hours until I'm at the polling place, again.

Actually, less -- I get there around 530, spend about ten minutes hammering the 'vote here' signs into place, and another fifteen moving the election stuff from the van into the church hall where we do it. The location isn't bad, but it's not great, either -- the church has two parking lots, one on either side, with a connecting road behind it; the door into the polling place is in back, down in a little gully, where the road connects to the right-side parking lot. So, you can't see where people go in if you use the right side lot (hence the signs; five of them in a fairly small area, stacked like the old Burma-Shave signs to keep people moving from the street across the parking lot and down the sloped corner to the door), and if you use the left lot, you can't even see the signs - which is why the very first sign is as far out as I can put it, in the strip of grass that's littered with elect-me signs. At 6, I unlock the back door (the church gives me a key, which I think very nice of them), flick on the lights, and wait for the crew to show up. It takes about thirty minutes to post all of the official notices, lay out the poll books and registers, and boot the voting machines and print out the documentation that 'proves' the vote-recorders were empty on arrival (I put that in quotes because I believe those things are eminently hackable; not by me, but by anyone who has an interest in doing so -- all I can do is keep them as secure as I can). After they all arrive, I lock the door again, so that no stray voters show up until the official start time. Usually that's not a problem, though at the Presidential, we had people arriving at six thirty, standing in line up the slope and into the lot.

Then at 7 (perhaps a minute or so before), I unlock, and we're off to the races -- for about thirty minutes; then we're down to perhaps two or three people an hour all day, and less in the middle of the day. We close down the voting at 8PM, and shut down -- it takes about 45 minutes to take down the notices and document the day; if you have absentee ballots to check (which I always hope we won't, but we do, this time), that's another 20 minutes, easily. Lots of cover envelopes/security envelopes/shuffle-the-ballots so no one knows who sent them. So I'll get to the county voting office around 940, if I'm lucky (always fun, there -- they use local prison inmates to assist in carrying in the signs, flags, etc -- first time I had a guy say politely Do you need help with that? who was someone I'd cross the street to avoid, I was startled -- though the sight of sheriff's deputies lounging about was reassuring), and then back home around 1030, exhausted.

Then I will check in on the results, and I'm sure, I'll be horrified. There will be lots of political blather -- Democrats saying This doesn't mean we were wrong, Republicans saying Oh it sure the hell does. Neither side entirely right, neither side entirely wrong, both sides thinking the wrong people got elected. Feh.

I believe that the next week or so will be a Don't Read The News period for me. Concentrate on French - just in case I have to move to Montreal.