A long, but rewarding, day

Yesterday was my first time ever being an elections officer. I've been considering doing it for a few years but, with covid, I figured that they would have a lot of turnover and would need more people. It was time for me to finally do it. I'm glad I did!

Monday night I did get ne next pair of veterans quilts loaded and I thought this was the perfect quilt to have on the machine this week.

So, here are some thoughts/observations about working in the voting precinct. 

The day starts really early. I was up at 3:30 and had to be at the precinct at 5:00 AM. The equipment and materials are VERY well organized in my county. Based on the training that we had I was not at all surprised by that. We had 8 workers at our precinct, 4 of us were new and 2 of the experienced ones had only worked a primary prior to this election.

41% of our registered 1449 voters had voted early (assuming that all absentee ballots were returned and counted). That meant that we didn't expect, and didn't get long lines. We had a line when we opened but the rest of the day was just steady. By the end of the day we calculated that 83% of our registered voters voted! That's an amazing number.

Aside from a little obnoxious behavior from one of the political parties (coming into the precinct to look around unofficially and then leaving all their signs for us to clean up) everything was really smooth. We aren't in an "important" area so I wasn't surprised. The voters were ALL pleasant and friendly as we received so much gratitude for being there. It was amazing. I have never once thanked my precinct officers for being there and I feel bad about that.

Our precinct is relatively small and our precinct captain is incredibly organized so we were closed out and I was home an hour and a half after the polls closed. 5:00AM to 8:30PM is a really long day but it was worth every minute of it. I also got to meet 2 of my new neighbors!

We had a curbside voting option and I spent a few hours outside waiting for nothing. It was a beautiful day so I enjoyed some quiet time listening to my book, greeting voters and making a lot of progress on this crochet blanket.

Today is going to be a slow and quite day. Maybe some quilting, binding and ironing.