Observers -

[Ms. Toad]

Send good thoughts tomorrow for your observers.

This is the fourth presidential election for which I've been an observer - and I'm worried. There seem to be about 2/3 new observers (a lot of experienced observers got snagged to be pollworkers). Credentialing (formal approval with a certificate that says you have a right to be inside the polling place and see everything) is always a bit chaotic - this year is no different. They are always juggling talents v. needs - so the first year I did this, I was switched from inside observer (during the early voting) to roving observer for election day(so they could send me to the place of greates need) to boiler room (since I am intimately familiar with voting machines - and they expected it to be an issue that year + I had caught a number of subtle problems during early voting so I'd built up a reputation). But - the last change came after 10 PM before the shift started at 5:30 AM.

So that part of the process is always unnerving - since you never know until the last minute where you will end up. But - the training this year was more chaotic than usual. And not everyone was sent all of the the documents that would let them do the job without much training - or they wound up in spam. I even volunteered to help out with training after my own training was not so hot. They didn't take me up on it. I attended a Q&A - which was better - but not advertised widely enough so that most people could find it. So I'm staying up for a while fielding questions on the conversation tool to try to calm nerves and point people in the right direction. Not my job, and I think I'm making the powers that be cranky, but I want my fellow observers to have the tools to do their jobs.

So send happy thoughts, or prayers, or good vibes for all of us tomorrow!

[Hoyt]

1. Good luck. Good to know you are on watch. Thanks.

[Ms. Toad]

2. I've got three precincts -

No idea if I've got an outside partner of not . . . but my fuzzy recollection from 4 years ago is that challenges in this voting location made it to my ears (as the person inside the BOE ferrying concerns from the boiler room to the BOE). It may be a fun day!

[Hoyt]

3. 3 precincts is a lot. My wife used to do poll work.

On her last, 2008, I dropped her off at 5:00 AM and picked her up a bit before 2:00 AM Wednesday. She loved that stuff. It’s a lot of work/effort, though. I’m prone to panic attacks in chaotic situations and crowds.

Seriously, I recognize and appreciate your doing this. Can’t wait for reports whenever you recuperate.

[Maeve]

4. Good thoughts for the observers and poll workers!

And I'm off for the longest day of my year; I have to help deliver the ballots to the BOE tonight so I won't be home until at least 10 pm, maybe later.
Have a good one, everybody!

[Ms. Toad]

5. Reporting in - post duty.

I was in a heavy minoirty precinct. The good news is that there was no harassment from Trump voters. A Black fraternity camped out in the parking lot and scared my Republican counterpart, and she kept taking pictures of them. The BOE told her to chill. They had the right to be there.

Republican flushing is real. They had a program that (theoretically) listed all of the voters in a precinct. The job of their observer was to get the 11 AM and 4 PM lists and mark off people who had already voted, so the folks in the field could flush out the remaining Republican votes and get them to the polls. The afternoon was certainly more heavily Republican. As of the 11:00 list, only 7 Republicans had shown up to vote (out of the 294 who had voted in by then). At the end of the day, there were ~100 votes for Trump out of the ~550 cast.

I talked to a student of mine this morning who is a member of the parking lot fraternity and suggested a slightly different focus for the next election, based on what I saw in the polling place.

We had an extraordinary number of people who had to vote provisional ballots - or be sent to another polling place becaus they had moved and had not changed their voting address. We lose a sizeable portion of those votes (about 20% of the provisionals, and a much larger portion of those who have to drive elsewhere to vote).

These were by and large Biden votes. (Two of the three precincts went for Biden by 95%, the third by about 55%) My suggestion to the fraternity - which focuses on voter registration and GOTV was to check in with registered voters in target precincts in the 6 months or so before elections with two focuses: (1) confirming that their registration matches their current address and (2) they know where their voting precinct is (especially if they have done a precinct shuffle). In addition to the 550 votes cast yesterday, we might have picked up many of the 45 votes that were cast provisionally and the approximately 50 people who were turned away to another precinct (many of whom, I'm sure, gave up when they couldn't vote where they thought they were expected to vote).

I used to teach in a poor, minority community. In the classes for those who were struggling, I ended the year with about the same number of students in my class as started the year - but only about 30% of the same students (i.e. a 2/3 swap of students due to movement in and out of the district) When you're focused on getting first and last, so you can have a roof over your head until the landlord evicts you - the last thing you're thinking about is updating your voter registration form. This community is less transient than that one was - but from my decade of workig with those students, I'm pretty sure if we can find a way to make it easy to keep up with voter registratoin they would, and we'd save a lot of votes.