Thread by @rachelbtiven, I was a pollworker in New York City yesterday. Mass in-person voting [...]

I was a pollworker in New York City yesterday. Mass in-person voting at neighborhood precincts is a bad way to run elections. A thread.

Don’t get me wrong: all of the pollworkers I met at my #UWS precinct except the coordinator were lovely people who were absolutely committed to ensuring each voter could vote. I didn’t see any voter treated with anything other than politeness and respect.

NYC pollworkers get paid, though not much. We do it because we are committed to civic participation.

But we can’t do it well. It’s a complex operational process, implemented by a seasonal workforce with minimal training, replicated across 1,000+ sites. It’s built to fail.

At 6 a.m. when voting began, the 9 of us had been there an hour and we were only half open. Of the four “election districts” that comprised our polling place, the coordinator said she had been ordered not to open two of them. What?

So the cabinets containing ballots and poll books for those districts remained locked up.

When voters assigned to those districts arrived at our polling place, they were told they couldn’t vote. Some voted affidavit ballots, others just left.

At 7:30 a.m. we were told to open those election districts, which we had barely enough staff to do. By late morning we were notified that we should have used scannable “emergency” ballots for those voters, not sealed affidavit ballots. By then those voters were long gone.

There were no hotly contested races in our districts, so traffic was light. Altogether, about a dozen voters were affected. This was just one example of how nonsensical or conflicting information disrupts a fragile process.

Short-staffed, there was little oversight.

At one table, voters only got one page of a 2-page ballot until another pollworker noticed and asked me to say something. Later in the day, a different table did the same until a voter asked why his Congressman wasn’t on his ballot. I don’t know how many times this happened.

An argument about how to handle voided ballots was resolved by a traveling inspector, who pulled down her mask to shout at me about how stupid I was. When I asked our coordinator if she would tell the other tables the answer, she snapped, “Please, I’ve got enough problems.”

The poll closed at 9 p.m. Roughly 300 people had voted with us. After closing, a scanner jammed, so we couldn’t do the hand-reconciliation of the ballot count that is required. We all waited 2 hrs for a technician before being told to go home, they’d count them at the office.

Even if every coordinator were a good manager and every volunteer flawless, our Rube Goldberg-like system for casting and counting ballots has many, many opportunities for error. Multiply that across 1000+ precincts, with thousands of pollworkers.

Making Election Day a holiday won’t fix this. Our voting system must be completely rebuilt, not just tweaked.

You may have heard NYC’s vote by mail attempt was a disaster. Of course it was! We have no infrastructure for it. Until an emergency order, it wasn’t even allowed.

States that are 100% vote by mail have warned that it takes a long time to set up a good system; you can’t do it on the fly. Duh.

But they’ve done it, and voter participation has gone up! In Washington, voters get a ballot and a voter guide with candidate statements (imagine!)

Everyone voting from home on paper ballots, via US Postal Service & local drop boxes, is the fairest, cheapest, safest way to vote. The 5 states that do it figured out how to accommodate people without a fixed address & who need access to in-person voting to cast a secret ballot.

I loved going to the polls with my parents. We can create new traditions for voting -- I’ll throw a party for folks to eat, drink, debate the candidates, and mail our ballots.

We don’t line up at schools and churches to pay our taxes. We shouldn't be voting that way either.//

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