How To Work The Polls.

3:50 a.m. Alarm goes off. Eh didn't really sleep much anyway.

5:00 a.m. Arrive at the Big City Courthouse downtown.

5:15 a.m. Finally get past the deputy who is doing security. If we're on the list can't we just be waved in. In the alternative, how about having more deputies to check our bags.

5:20 a.m. Be in the jury pool room with over 200 other poll workers being held in reserve to plug gaps. Smartest thing this bumbling County Clerk has done in 2 years.

6:30 a.m. Jury pool room has around 100 people left.

8:00 a.m. Jury pool room has around 60 people left.

9:00 a.m. Cross the street to grab some coffee.

11:00 a.m. Call for all members of one political party to go to another room.

11:01 a.m. Person in the other room wonders what the hell all these people are doing in her room. Screaming on walkie-talkie begins.

11:05 a.m. I'm back in jury pool room reading a book.

11:15 a.m. More specific party members are grabbed to be Commissioners who deliver absentee ballots to the precincts by cab.

11:18 a.m. Wolfrham Hart is back in jury pool room since they only needed three Commissioners.

1:00 p.m. Cross the street to grab lunch.

1:20 p.m. 38 people left in the jury pool room. Wolfham Hart is the last known specific party member standing. Bring it other party members!

3:40 p.m. Last of the jury pool room is being sent out to be extra staff to help count votes and deal with all 100,000 absentee ballots. I've already figured that's an average of 160 or so absentee ballots per precinct. 30 is traditionally considered a lot.

4:00 p.m. Wolfrham Hart arrives at the predominantly Democratic/AfricanAmerican precinct as an undercover brother. 235 absentee ballots are 30 seconds behind me.

4 to 6 p.m. Prepare, organize, and qualify 235 absentee ballots. I hope I can get some ballots through the machine before closing time. Otherwise we'll be here awhile. Based on the steam of traffic coming in that doesn't look likely.

CLOSING TIME. No line finally and we close the polls. I happen to be holding the instructions concerning absentee ballots and read them aloud. One lady states what she did with the absentee ballots in another district earlier today. I read the instructions IN MY HANDS again aloud!

Begin feeding 232 qualified absentee ballots into a glorified scantron machine for the next 90 minutes. It only jammed once and rejected 2 ballots.

Interesting observations. Many absentee ballots are straight ticket votes with most being for the Democrats. I'm surprised by the amount of ticket splitting.

90 minutes after CLOSING. Precinct inspector and I collect votes from all machines and get a printout reporting the results.

95 minutes after CLOSING. Attempt to get extra printouts and get weird messages from the machine. We do Step 6. We do Step 7. We do Step 8. At that point the instructions state,"Before performing Step 8 you must..." HEY SHOULDN'T THAT WARNING BE IN FRONT OF STEP 8! Vote machine starts beeping and producing odd messages.

97 minutes after CLOSING. After reading the display messages the tech states if he was there he would kill us. We reply the instructions are crappily written and any warnings should come BEFORE the step!

More observations. In a precinct that normally gets 200 to 400 votes, we got 803 live votes. Add in the 232 qualified absentee ballots we totaled 1,035 votes. Obama got 914 and McCain got 115. In this precinct it is a Democrat landslide.

Help the inspector fill out a metric buttload of paperwork until two hours and thirty minutes after CLOSING. We drive separately to a regional collection place to drop off all the ballots and other stuff.

Three hours after CLOSING. We're checked out and dismissed. I want some Burger King right now and need to crash so bad. I'm totally exhausted. I'm amazed this country can hold elections every few years with mostly volunteers. Why is my first hearing at 8:15 a.m.? If you work the polls you should be allowed to take the next morning off. I hope you all voted one way or another.