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Mark Kinsler| Special to the Eagle-Gazette

On Election Day, continued the letter from the Fairfield County Board of Elections, You shall appear at the assigned polling place promptly at 5:00 AM to serve as a FLOATER PEO of such election. You shall take and subscribe to an oath to discharge your duties to the best of your ability. [Note: a PEO is a Precinct Election Official, which sounds grander than it is.]

How do we get into these situations? I wearily asked Natalie, whod received an identical letter.

Its your fault, she answered. You wanted to do your civic duty, so here we are.

Yup, there we were, at the AMVETS headquarters on Maple Street, standing in a circle of ten or so yawning oath-takers at five a.m. on a rainy Tuesday morning. Wed helped unload the election truck, one of 15 or 20 loaded and dispatched from the Board of Elections building hours earlier. Each contained fold-up voting booths, eight Dominion voting machines and their printers, a ton or so of extension cords, paper ballots, I voted stickers, many rolls of tape, American flags of assorted sizes, and four inexplicably heavy orange traffic cones.

All of which is to say that running a free and fair election is an enormous task, and our election ladies somehow do it with calm efficiency.

Weve been election roustabouts previously but were really still rookies. Everyone else was a ten-year member of the Sunrise Election Club, and all of them knew each other except, as usual, us.

Natalie was assigned to watch the voting booths and assist voters who had trouble with the voting machines. She worked with a lady who was, by regulation, a member of the opposite party, as the instructions put it. Thats because the law states that officials of both parties have to be present when a voter has a question.Its tedious, but like the other regulations makes perfect sense because it prevents anyone from fast-talking a voter.

I was assigned one of the voter registration machines: each voter would present some form of identification and, if I did it right and didnt put their drivers license in upside down, theyd be handed a coded voting-permission card to be inserted into the voting machine itself.

There are also paper ballots, provisional ballots, drive-up voter ballots, and probably others. The filled-out ballots are sealed and kept secret by several means, and I can assure anyone and everyone that an Ohio election cannot be thrown.

At one point Natalie and I swapped jobs, but I kept falling asleep and both of our elderly carcasses (carci?) grew painfully creaky from sitting so long. We worked until 8:00 P.M. and dont expect to recover for perhaps a week.

But the work was fun and worthwhile. And they pay us.

Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail.com, is currently recovering with Natalie at our home-based field hospital in Lancaster. Two nurse cats are in attendance.

Read more from the original source:
Kinsler: We invade the Arsenal of Democracy - Lancaster Eagle Gazette