Election Day officials are the people sitting at the folding tables in gyms, libraries, fire stations and schools in your precinct, calling you forward to ask for your address, giving you a piece of paper to carry three steps over to hand the next election official who gives you a ballot, urges you to fill in the little oval completely and directs you to the cluster of little desks barricaded behind red-white-and-blue cardboard walls where you hunker down and enact democracy.
Every Election Day, these officials, or EDOs, facilitate the nuts-and-bolts of democracy, but in Montgomery County, this fundamental job is mostly discovered by word-of-mouth and turnover is unpredictable.
The system seems precarious, but it also seems to work and the small army of people opening the doors at dawn, paging through the poll books to find your name, helping you feed your vote into the counter, eating their sandwiches standing in the hall, then, and this is the exciting part: closing the polls, carefully counting the ballots, and then late in the evening, calling in the tally—they see the job as not just important and interesting, but fun.
“I would say it’s something people may not realize they would enjoy,” Chris Quesenberry, who’s been a Radford election official since 2011, said. “We’re definitely not in there taking one for the team, slogging it out. We enjoy it.”
Becoming an EDO requires a person be a registered voter, able to read, write and speak English and attend training at least 30 days before an Election Day.
Sweetening the deal, a person’s time is compensated. EDOs are paid $150 to serve on Election Day. Some employers compensate their workers for serving.
New EDOs receive $25 for the required six hours of training in Montgomery County and there’s a lot to learn.
Every EDO needs to know how to operate all the stations, the poll books, manage the ballot table and the ballot bin, be a line monitor, a voting booth officer and a tabulator officer. What’s more, training imparts consistency and etiquette that, in turn, imparts confidence in the voting procedure.
“Most importantly, the people are supposed to conduct themselves in a particular manner along the way,” John Brill, the secretary of the Roanoke City electoral board representing the Republican Party, said. “How to conduct yourself to comply with the election law of Virginia. The important thing is putting due attention and diligence and making sure the voting experience is consistent across the locality.”
While it’s a noble job, it’s a long day. EDOs turn on the lights at 5 a.m. getting the room ready, unfolding tables, arranging the equipment, hanging up signs, setting up poll books and the voting machines.
Then the day begins, and despite all the consistency and the etiquette, human vagaries come into play.
“There are so many iterations of odd things that can happen at a polling station,” Quesenberry said. “Spoiled ballots—you’d be surprised how many. A person will get a ballot and mark the wrong candidate and say ‘Oh! I don’t want to vote for him!’ and they need a new ballot. We’ve had people forget to mark anything at all. People come in and start talking to friends and forgot why they were there.”
Of course, for an EDO, and for all of us, it’s the end of the day that counts, closing the precinct in a quick, efficient manner and then performing the critical task of tallying the votes, recording and reporting them.
“These EDOs do a tremendously fantastic job,” Brill said. “At the end of the day, they have to do an accounting of all the ballots they have: how many they had at the beginning of the day, what happened over the day, spoiled ballots, voided ballots and how many they have left.”
When the polls have closed, the EDO phones in the results to the registrar. Banks of people receive calls from EDOs across a locality or a state, writing down what the EDO’s report on a tally sheet. Then the tally sheet goes to the General Registrar who enters the numbers into an unofficial tally.
“We used to have a big metal box,” Brill, who was a long-time EDO before becoming an electoral board member, said. “That’s what I’d do. I take them back to the registrar at city hall. Then the Electoral Board comes in and they do the actual count. The Electoral Board is another check on the results. You see the number on television on election night. Those numbers are preliminary, until the board verifies and certifies that the information was accurately recorded.”
In that process, there are places where error can happen.
“Just somebody said 46 and it got written down as 64 or maybe it was 67 or written as 66. It’s those kinds of little errors,” Brill said. “But in the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve not seen errors that would even come close to changing the results. But some elections are determined by one vote. So this stuff matters.”
Four months from the next election, with whiffs that foreign powers are meddling in those elections and prying at the divides between us that “this stuff matters” comes into sharp focus.
“If someone is worried about elections, their fairness. If you participated in this process, any worry would be out of your head. The checks and balances—you’ve got anywhere between five and nine people double-checking. It’s just not plausible,” Quesenberry said.
To that, Brill adds a no-nonsense call to action.
“Some people are generally distrustful of the election process,” Brill said. “Well, if you have a problem with the process, you can do something about that. You can become an EDO to make sure the election in your precinct is run right.”
The Officer of Elections Interest form is on the bottom of the state elections website (www.elections.virginia.gov/index.html) in the left hand corner with “Important Forms.”
People who have completed the Officer of Elections application will be contacted for training. Fall elections are Tuesday, Nov. 6.