Of course you’ll vote because that’s what you do. And while you’re at the polls take note that the workers there are your neighbors, friends and sometimes even family.
My mother-in-law worked at the polls and so did her friend Hazel. This was when Islanders voted at three firehouses and the school, with two Democrats and two Republicans stationed at each polling place.
When Hazel caught the flu, I was invited to fill her position and said yes before I realized that I’d be there from 5:30 a.m. until about 10 or 11 at night, even later if we had a problem with the math.
Until that time I was registered as an Independent, then someone said, “Hey, you’re replacing a Democrat. I wonder if you’ll get paid?” Between Election Day and payday, I registered as a Democrat.
Yep, I’m that kind of person, I did it for the money.
Pastries at the Polls
Those not in the biz probably don’t know that poll workers are called Election Inspectors. That official title was compensation for the fact that $90 divided by 14+ hours doth not a great hourly wage make. The pay has improved, but it’s still a long and mind-numbing day.
When I was an inspector rules were a lot looser than they are now. The three other inspectors and I shared the important responsibilities, such as who would bring the coffee pot, the crock pot, sandwiches, sodas and pastries, pastries. (Yes, I know, I wrote it twice because there were that many pastries.)
One year a poll worker lugged in her sewing machine because she was behind on Christmas projects. Then midday we covered for her while she ran home to get her ironing board so she could press open some seams — that big, heavy voter registration book just wasn’t working.
People who voted that day (all 104 of them) must have felt like they’d walked into someone’s kitchen instead of the parking bay of the Cobbetts Lane firehouse. We spent the day talking and laughing and eating twice our weight in Entenmann’s so that during the last two hours, when we had that after-dinner rush of seven or eight voters, we were so punch-drunk from garage fumes, caffeine and sugar, even relatives had to tell us their last names.
“And how do you spell that again?” we’d ask, because our brains had jammed right after that fifth Raspberry Cheese Danish.
Let the counting begin
Once the polls closed, what we’d been dreading for hours still loomed ahead of us. At some point midafternoon a County Sheriff had delivered a sealed manila envelope containing our district’s absentee ballots. At 9:00:02, we locked the big green voting machine and under blinding fluorescent light, began to tabulate absentee ballots.
Just a few ballots, it was easy; more than that and things got complicated. Inevitably someone would mark the paper ballot in red crayon, erase a choice or cross it out, then write a note about why, even though instructions clearly stated: BLACK OR BLUE INK ONLY. NO ERASURES. NO CROSS OUTS. AND NO CUTE NOTES! (I added that last.)
After the paper ballots were tabulated, a job now handled at the Board of Elections, it was time to open the back of the voting machine and count the votes. That took all four of us, two people to call out and record the numbers and two people to pray that everything would add up.
Occasionally our prayers were answered, but mostly not and we’d have to do the math again. And again. For hours. Sometimes there would be tears.
The more things change …
Things have changed. We gather at one central polling place now and not only has the way we vote evolved, so has the role of Election Inspectors.
No more big green voting machines and you probably won’t spot an ironing board or a Singer Zig-zag either, but if you glance at the garbage can you’ll see those empty Entenmann’s boxes.
And if it’s late in the day and the glassy-eyed inspector has to ask you, twice, to spell your last name, just do it; even if she is your neighbor. Or your mother-in-law.
“Perils & Pastries at the Polls” is the Gazette debut for Joanne Sherman’s Off the Cuff column. Look for a new post from her every other Tuesday (or so). A former Associate Editor of the Shelter Island Reporter, she’s won multiple awards for her humor columns in both the Suffolk Times and the Reporter. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Southern Living, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle and other publications. She wrote a column, “Can We Talk”, in Toastmaster, a magazine for Toastmasters International, and was an award-winning humorist/commentator for WPBX radio in Southampton. She and her husband, Hoot Sherman, live on Shelter Island.
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