One vote at a time: My day as a poll watcher.

My kitchen table pile of poll watching materials.

It was still dark outside when voters started lining up last week.

The poll workers were already inside, putting the finishing touches on the polling place, better known as an elementary school gym.

Everything had been set up the day before. All that was left was to turn on the tablets that checked in voters, the voting touchscreens (and the printers attached to them) and the ballot scanner at the end of the process, which turns out to be the way votes are actually counted in Georgia.

Because that’s where I was on Election Day: At a working-class precinct in a county near Atlanta, volunteering as a poll watcher for the Georgia Democratic party.

The election didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would, but that’s not what this column is about. This column is about what I learned on a long and (thankfully) boring day about myself and about my fellow citizens.

My advance training to be a poll watcher was thorough and detailed. In both the online courses I took and the discussions with my fellow poll watchers — a hardy group of Memphians who had driven to Georgia to watch the polls with me — there were myriad details and processes, all of which were meant to help make sure every qualified voter was able to vote and every single vote was counted.

Though there were several bomb threats in the area on Election Day (nearly immediately attributed to Russian bots by the police, though a polling place where one of our group was working had to be evacuated), I was more worried that I would mess up and get thrown out of the polling place by the poll manager than about my own safety. There was a law enforcement officer at the polling place all day.

The rules were strict: I couldn’t use my phone (or any technology) inside the polling place. I could sit and watch pretty much wherever I wanted to, but if a voter had a problem, I was to follow them outside and only then could I ask what had gone wrong and offer to help fix it. I had to report every interaction I had with a voter to a special website; every hour I also reported how long the line to vote was.

My shift began at 6:30am and lasted until well after the polls closed at 7pm. No break for lunch or dinner; I grabbed snacks throughout the day from a bag in my car. I may never eat another soggy bag of pretzels.

But it was a day I’ll never forget.

Even though we knew that a majority of Georgia voters had voted early, there was a steady stream of voters all day long. Food servers in uniform, on their way to work or at the end of their shift. Ramp workers wearing the uniforms of the various airlines at nearby Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Entire families, including little kids, on their way home at the end of the day. A mom and dad with a newborn traded off holding the baby while the other went in to vote.  

Quite a few voters were first-timers: A mother with her 18-year-old daughter told me she knew she’d be late to work, but she wanted to be sure she saw her daughter vote for the first time. We all applauded when the daughter’s vote tallied with a click of the scanner; she looked pretty happy, too. An older woman with her adult daughter were both first-time voters; I heard the older woman tell one of the poll workers that she’d never really been interested in voting before.

Of course I was dying to ask her more about her story. Of course I didn’t.

The poll workers were calm and professional. Clearly they’d all done this work for years, though S., the poll manager, had decided this would be her last election. I didn’t ask her why — she didn’t really invite casual conversation — but I could guess. It’s a detailed, exacting job that is thankless at best and can put you in the eye of a storm at worst.

There was no doubt in my mind that S. and her team were doing to do everything they could to be sure every vote was counted properly, no matter who you were planning to vote for. When a young woman showed up and wasn’t registered  — she thought registering for food stamps automatically registered her to vote — S. consulted by phone with her boss (at the county Board of Elections, I assumed) and had the young woman fill out a provisional (paper) ballot, along with an voter registration application.

Would her vote be counted, I asked later. “I don’t know,” said S., looking doubtful.

Yes, after a while I was able to chat with the poll workers, though I mostly tried to stay out of the way. When they found out I was from Memphis, they asked who was paying me, and couldn’t really believe I’d do this as a volunteer.

Turns out volunteer poll watchers aren’t new; one woman I met during my time in Georgia said she had been poll watching since the first time Barack Obama was elected. There was supposed to be a Republican volunteer as well as an Independent volunteer at every polling place, but I ended up being the only volunteer at the elementary school.

My favorite voter story was when a young man, who’d voted earlier in the day, came back with his DJ equipment and set up outside the electioneering perimeter. He began broadcasting music live online and exhorting friends and neighbors who could hear him — the music was pretty loud for this residential neighborhood — not to miss their chance to vote. It was cool — he kept the music going long after it got dark.

When the polls closed — there was no last-minute rush of voters, though we all expected one — the most important part of the day began: Closing the polling place and making sure the votes that were scanned matched the number of ballots in the scanner (one of my jobs was to look and be sure the numbers matched; they did). S. and her team printed out reports from the scanner, broke down the tables, put the printers and touchscreens away, locked up the machines with specially labeled zip ties, and signed and cataloged various parts of the operation. Another worker told me that only S. could touch the red canvas box that contained the actual ballots — 392 of them, stacked neatly, on their way to the county Board of Elections.

I found myself getting emotional, watching them.

What I know for sure after my day of poll watching is that voting is a sacred right of citizenship, and seeing so many people take that right so seriously is reassuring (and infuriating when you think about how many times various candidates threw shade at both the voters and the process). I saw firsthand how difficult it would be to rig this meticulous process and corrupt — or even distract — these hardworking public servants.

I look forward to our next chance to get it right.