And just like that, we’re poll workers!
The Polls pt. 2: Training Day
On September 12, Donald Trump urged his followers to vote twice to make sure their votes are counted. On September 29, during the first presidential debate, he called upon white nationalist group The Proud Boys to “stand by,” which many saw as encouraging them to lord over the election process.
On October 5 the COVID numbers in San Diego county hit 48,821 total cases, with 3,653 hospitalizations and 806 deaths.
This is also the day that I begin classroom training to be a polling site manager.
The sun is only peeking above the horizon when I arrive at the Marina Village conference center. Since the pandemic has smashed my internal clock, my body feels pulled by two conflicting emotions: the indignity of having to be somewhere so early and the guilt of feeling indignant. Part of me wants everyone I encounter to acknowledge that I’m bravely sacrificing my mornings for what is essentially just a regular job.
I wear a tie and slacks. “Dress for success” is a term people say, I think. Given my housebound status over the past seven months, I’m experiencing what a friend termed the “pandemic schlub-up,” and my dress clothes are a lot tighter than the last time I wore them. However, looking around at my fellow site managers, I realize that I’m probably overdressed. There’s a guy in shorts and a polo, as if he’s planning to golf a quick back nine after class. I see a man in stylishly ripped jeans that probably cost more than all the money I’ve received in unemployment benefits.
In the classroom, there are name tags designating where we should sit, and I’m thankful for this little mercy. The last thing I want to do is decide which person I sit next to, nor do I want to experience PTSD flashbacks from grade school, where every averted eye indicates that stranger’s desire for you to find a seat elsewhere.
I find my name tag at a seat next to a small woman who introduces herself as Sally. She’s wearing a face shield which makes her sound like she’s coming from a 1930s radio. But despite Sally’s small stature and our muffled conversation, there’s an intensity to Sally that makes me just a little bit frightened of her.
The shorts ‘n’ polo guy takes a seat in front of us and I’m immediately grateful I’m not his table partner. I mentally assign him his name: “Golf Guy.” Golf Guy has this excruciating habit of pinching his face mask at the lips, as if he’s giving himself a beak. Quit touching it! I want to scream. What are you doing? Creating a pocket for easier breathing? Consolidating the amount of space it takes on your face? Golf Guy also occasionally lets his nose hang over his mask—an act that feels as obscene these days as walking around with your dick out.
Next to Golf Guy is a well-groomed man with white hair and an air of money to him, so I call him “The CEO.” I also assume his societal stature by the way he drinks from his thermos. There’s no considerate attempt to covertly sip while pulling his mask to the side, but a dramatic full-on mask-removal, followed by a luxurious gulp and then an equally dramatic, two-handed method of re-donning the mask, like a teenager in the ‘90s with a Cobain haircut, tucking hair behind their ears. I swear I hear The CEO once go Ahhhhh after taking a drink.
Our trainers are Debbie and Sandra, with Ellen as their lead. Ellen is a long-time employee with the Registrar of Voters—she’s worked something like 16 elections and yet somehow she’s still alive. I’m almost certain that anyone who works regularly with the ROV is out of their minds, but in a good way. Ellen is loud and friendly—a personality trait that comes from years of interacting with our country’s most surly, impatient population, the American Voter.
Class starts with an introductory video, projected too small for any of us to get any real value from it. Debbie places a lavalier mic next to the speaker built into the projector and amplifies it through a small Ibanez amp. “We’re very high tech around here,” she says. The tinny sound it produces is like that of an old Disneyland ride.
We watch a series of videos that prepare us for working an election during COVID (“A person’s right to vote takes precedence over their decision to wear a face mask”), a portion on cultural sensitivity, and a video about assisting people with disabilities. (“Don’t distress the dog!!” I write in my notes). Each segment possesses a signature litigiousness often found in government-produced PSAs, which ultimately feels pandering and impractical. However, this is as close as I’ve gotten to seeing a movie in the theaters in a long time, and I absorb every cinematic moment with my mouth agape in stupid awe.
At the end of film, we’re all made to stand up and recite the Poll Worker Oath. Some people put a hand over their hearts. Together, we mumble along with the tinny voice coming through the Ibanez:
I do hereby solemnly declare that I will support the Constitution of the State of California. I further affirm that I am a Citizen of the United States of America or lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States and that I will, to the best of my ability, faithfully discharge the duties of Election Officer.
And just like, that we’re poll workers! The video congratulates us, and, not gonna lie: the validation feels great.
For the next eight hours, Debbie and Sandra dump slide after slide of information on us. We learn that 1,548 polling locations have been consolidated into 235 Super Polls, we learn about the five roles our staff (called “board members”) will have: line manager, greeter, check-in TI (technical inspector), voter assistant, and check out TI. They cover the Ballot Marking Device (BMD)—aka the touch-screen voting machine—and the electronic pollbooks (or EPBs), which will replace the paper roster this year. Those that have worked elections before seem very excited about the EPBs.
In the back of my mind, I know this information is boring, boring, boring, but I’m so stimulated by being in a room with strangers—inside a room!—that I’m enraptured. I furiously scribble notes like a goddamn AP student. I volunteer to read projections aloud (although not as many times as The CEO, who volunteers to read so many slides that I begin to suspect that it’s his power move). Once while he’s reading aloud, I catch sight of a copy of Men’s Health tucked away in his leather ledger and I make a mental note to add that to my list of grievances against him.
In the back of the room, Sandra and Debbie have set up a mock poll, complete with a check-in table and voting booths. They hand us little scraps of paper with items written on them—items which they’ve spent the past hour describing a) their purpose and b) how to properly sanitize them. Our assignment is to identify in which station our item belongs. My paper says “Yellow ballot bag.” Easy. I drop my label on the corresponding line manager station. I check my watch. According to my schedule, this activity is supposed to go on for another 20 minutes.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Sally asks. I shrug, so she asks in what part of the city I live, which she masterfully uses as a springboard to talk about the Pacific Beach real estate market.
“I’m selling my condo,” she says, speaking with the soft assuredness of a telemarketer. “If you’re looking for a place in Pacific Beach, right now is the perfect time.”
I’m not, and never will be, looking for a place in Pacific Beach, but I say, “good to know!” As our conversation goes on, I learn that Sally was recently laid off from her job in July because of COVID. I don’t ask what it was that she did, and it seems like the type of job that defined her, and I suspect that losing it might have been devastating.
In addition to selling her condo, Sally tells me that she also recently sold her car and gave away most of her clothes. “Have you heard of Marie Kondo?” she asks. It’s as if she’s shedding her former life, a life that no longer sparks joy, and that this site manager gig is the start of whatever comes next. Listening to Sally’s story makes me a little sad—not just for her, but for all of us. This virus has taken so much, and has forced so many to start from zero.
But Sally’s Kondo-esque, monastic transformation isn’t entirely complete, and sometimes her business persona slips out, especially when she snidely critiques some aspect of our training.
“What is the point of this?” she says to me quietly during the activity. “This is not organized. Nobody knows what they’re doing.” However, she’s very quick to apologize each time after demeaning the program. “I’m sorry. My doctors tell me I have a type triple-A personality.” Sally will tell me about her “type triple-A personality” no less than four times over the next week.
We break for lunch, and Sally asks what I’m going to eat.
“I brought my own lunch,” I say.
“Oh, that’s smart.” She pauses. “You know, I’m glad we’re partners. I could tell you were kind the moment you introduced yourself.”
To have Sally’s approval somehow feels like the best gift in the world. I bask in the compliment while eating my lunch (peanut butter and honey sandwich) alone in my car. I turn on my radio and learn that Trump—who’d tested positive for COVID a few days prior—is being released from the hospital.
You win some, you lose some.
THE WEEKLY GOODS
Watch this
2020 hasn’t been a great year for horror films. I mean, maybe I’m just not looking in the right spots, or maybe I’m willfully putting blinders on, or maybe there’s just been too much real world horror this year that we don’t need these types of movies, but apart from frightening found-footage flick Host, this year’s horror dosage has felt pretty dry. And then I watched His House on Netflix. The film follows Bol and Rial, Sudanese refugees who’ve just arrived in London after a harrowing journey across the ocean. When the government grants them probational asylum, they’re thrilled, but the excitement turns sour when they realize that their new home is the definition of squalor—a vermin-filled hellhole in the outskirts of town. Oh, and it’s also haunted. In an effort to not raise concerns or cause any trouble (“We are good people” Bol repeatedly says), the couple endures the frightening visions, which slowly forces them to confront the demons that they’ve carried with them from across the ocean. His House not only speaks to the real-world horrors of immigration, racism and xenophobia, but the supernatural scares—which are increasingly surreal and disturbing—are stacked on top of each other so high that it almost becomes unbearable to watch.
Read this
Sometimes we just need a story about a cat to ground us, which is why I loved Karen Pearlman’s Union-Tribune story about Princess Tyga, the emotional support cat adopted by the staff at Lemon Grove’s City Hall. A lot of hard-nosed journalists are very quick to dismiss stories like this as “puff pieces,” but I think these are the type of stories that humanizes the news, and reminds us that we’re all part of a community. Plus, Pearlman uses the cute animal angle to get into the very real fear and trepidations that many feel upon rejoining the workforce.
Buy this
I know pointed you toward my nutso history text/fan fiction zine Donald Trump is a Loser last week, but Donald Trump is still a loser this week and I’ve woken up every day since he lost the election just marinating in fact that he’s a loser. Here are a few samples of what you can expect:
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Julia Dixon Evans edited this post. Thanks, Julia. Go follow her on Twitter.