So I volunteered this Election to be a poll worker at our 27, 28 and 29th wards here in Waukesha, WI. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but had never gotten around to it. We had a good number of workers and were not understaffed as is common in elections. I was given the task of dealing with absentee ballots. Waukesha is one of only a few municipalities in Wisconsin that does not centralize the tallying of absentees. They are instead sent out to the wards to be verified, logged, and placed into the optical scanner. We had a folding table full of Absentee Ballots - probably about 400 or so that had to be taken to the poll books and logged in in the lulls between in-person voters. I was placing a batch into the scanner and had a feeling it took me a while to identify. Finally, I figured out that it felt similar to distributing Eucharist. (OK, back off orthodoxy police. This is a comparison of FEELING, not a theological statement.) Processing someone's absentee ballot is a sacred trust. The right to vote is our most basic right. You hold in your hands the hopes of a person for the future of their government and their trust is that you will handle it with the reverence and care. It also means that I put at least 200 ballots in the ballot box - a legal ballot stuffer! It was not what I would call "fun," but it was very satisfying.
David+
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