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Day 2 as a Poll Worker…
“Mega-flex” is not just me bragging about the time Jennifer Aniston hugged me.
Day two at our polling place felt a little more relaxed. We’d had a day to figure out how not to botch democracy by doing the procedures in the right order on the first try. Today, we were the rulers of admin and ballers of security.
I was looking forward to both teenagers performing for us today. They had speeches they wanted to practice when we had downtime. But the young woman couldn’t get her script as we don’t have any WiFi (another important point in elections — the routing system that the voting machines are not accessible to us or anyone else) and the young man was more interested in getting his marine biology homework done than doing his speech. Sadly, I was not given the chance to do what I do best — judge. Instead, I got jealous, yet again, because teenagers can take freaking marine biology in high school. Further proof I was born before recorded time.
An observation about voters who come in, other than everyone is kind, nice, and truly a cross-section of this community is that maybe 5% of them are wearing masks. Only one other poll worker beside myself is masking the whole time. And after my shift today, I logged onto social media to see another friend who got COVID for the first time. The disconnect of where we are at is frustrating but also, a massive failure…