Iowa Poll Watcher

            This year, for the first time in my life, I volunteered to be a poll watcher for the local Democratic Party.  My local polling place is the high school in La Porte City, Iowa. This polling place serves not only the town itself but also the surrounding countryside, including the rural area where I live.  I took the first shift, from 6:30 AM to 10:30 AM.  The polls do not open till 7:00, but we were required to be there early.  I was relieved at 10:30 AM, but returned to take the 3rd shift from 2:30 PM till 6:30 PM.  The 4th shift poll watcher who relieved me would stay till the polls close and then take certain information to the county party's office.  Iowa law allows each party to have up to 3 poll watchers at any poll at any given moment.  When voters register,  the book they must sign has 3 carbon copies, and each party poll-watching  delegation is given one copy, which they return to the party to use for statistical purposes.   Along with this information, the poll watcher's report includes his personal notes concerning any irregularities, should there be any.  Of course, any serious irregularity would be reported by the poll watchers via cell phone, and a battalion of lawyers would be dispatched to the scene immediately.

            The election judges stay the whole day--6:30 AM to about 10:00 PM.  They are all elderly retirees, and I'm not sure how they manage.  My precinct was Spring Creek Township, whose polling place shared a large room with another township.   So we really had two elections going on at the same time in the same room.  I had my desk set up in a location that allowed me to keep an eye on both operations,  and I shared this desk with my Republican counterpart.

            Let me explain how voting takes place in Iowa:  As the voters standing in line come into the room, they approach the table for the township or precinct where they live. There are three judges at each  table. One judge allows the voter to sign the registration book and issues a blank form on which the voter certifies that he is indeed eligible to vote in that election at that place. The next judge checks the voter's photo Identification. If he does not have a photo ID, this will not prevent him from voting-- it will just make it a little more complicated.  If the person has recently changed address and is not listed in the voter rolls as living in that precinct, he must then show evidence of his address. A recent utility bill in his name, mailed to that address will suffice.  After establishing who he is and where he lives, a third judge issues a ballot and a privacy folder, and the voter takes this ballot to a small privacy booth and votes it. This booth is just a small card table with a low screen on three sides.  An Iowa ballot is a printed form with the candidates' names listed, along with party affiliation. In front of each name is a small circle.  To select a candidate or party slate, you simply blacken the circle with a special pen that is provided.  After voting his ballot, the voter walks back to the judges' table and a judge directs him to the ballot box, which is in plain sight in the middle of the room. The voter slides his ballot out of the privacy folder and into the box.

            The ballot box is a large locked bin with an electronic vote counting machine mounted on top. This machine looks like a computer printer, except that instead of spitting out paper, it takes it in. When you slide a ballot into the machine, the machine counts the votes for each candidate and records this information onto its memory card and then drops the paper ballot into the locked bin, where it is saved and can be re-counted by hand if necessary. On the front of the machine is an LED readout which displays the count of how many ballots have been received and counted.  This count is also recorded onto a paper tape inside the machine.  At the end of the day, this count must match the number of signatures of voters who have signed the register. When the polls close, the voting results are transmitted by wire to the county election office, and also to the Iowa Secretary of State. Then the actual ballots are taken in a locked box to the County Auditor's office and placed in a vault. 

            If doubt arises as to whether a particular voter is eligible to vote, she may cast a provisional ballot.  This is a regular paper ballot, but instead of depositing it into the ballot box, she seals it in a plain privacy envelope, and then in an envelope with her name and address. She returns this to the judge, who places it in a special envelope taken to the county election office. When the votes are tallied, if the voter in question is really eligible and has not voted in another location or by some other means, such as mail-in ballot, then the vote is counted.

            There are many kinds of complications that can arise.  If a voter claims that she had requested and received a mail-in ballot, but had lost it or ruined it--she is simply allowed to cast a provisional ballot.  The system is such that no matter what happens, every voter votes once--but no person votes twice.   And it all happens in an atmosphere that is cheerful, civil, and meticulously open.  No electioneering is allowed within 300 ft of a polling place on Election Day, and everyone knows this and respects it.  Besides, people are on their best behavior on Election Day.  La Porte is a friendly little town, but even people who would not be civil to each other at any other time of the year would take extreme care to do so at the polls.  In Iowa, Election Day is like a national holiday, and the holiday spirit requires you to treat all of your fellow voters with respect.   Voting is a sacred duty, and an Iowan would be no more likely to insult or intimidate  a fellow voter at the polls than to heckle a priest about to consecrate the host on Easter Sunday Mass.  Even if we didn't respect each other,  which we generally do, we would still respect the process.

            After my 6:30 to 10:30 shift was over, I drove to Waterloo, where my wife was part of the Obama Team Get-Out-The-Vote drive.   There, in a small house in a modest residential neighborhood,  rows of men and women with cell phones sat in the kitchen and living room, calling party members to remind them to vote if they have not already done so. Other volunteers were walking from house to house in every neighborhood, explaining why this election is important, and making a last appeal for the candidates.  After wishing these people well, I found a bite to eat, and then returned to my post.  One of the machines malfunctioned at 4:00 pm.  It began rejecting all ballots.  The judge called for a repairman, and then voting continued, but with the ballots placed in a special holding bin.  When the repairman arrived, he brought a new machine.   With the judge and both party poll watchers observing, the repairman broke the seal on the machine, took it apart, and removed the memory card and the paper tape. Before doing this, we wrote down the number displayed on the old machine's LED readout, and it showed that the last vote counted was # 510.  The repairman installed the memory card and the paper tape in the new machine, and the readout said #510.  All of this was done in view of the judge and two poll watchers, and the repairman stopped at every step to explain to us what he was doing. The judge could have taken the ballots in the holding bin out and run them through the counter at that time, but she felt that this would delay the voting.  So she decided that these ballots would be counted at the closing of the polls.  Both poll watchers wrote exact descriptions of this event, to be included in the report given to their respective parties.  The whole process took less than two minutes, and hardly delayed the voting at all.  So far, this post has been a rather boring, nuts-and-bolts description of how the Iowa polling system is set up. I did this deliberately, because one of my fellow Democrat poll watchers informed me that delegations from all over the country and all over the world often visit Iowa to observe our polling process.  They do this because the Iowa system is widely cited as the textbook case of a fair, efficient, and fraud-proof system.

            The poll watching experience was mostly boring, and to relieve the boredom I engaged my Republican counterparts in polite conversation.   I had not expected this to be a pleasant interaction, but it was.   To be designated by your party as a poll watcher, you have to be a party loyalist, and when one considers how acrimonious and vicious some of the campaign rhetoric coming from the candidates has been (particularly on the Republican side), I was afraid that the Republican I would be seated next to might have horns and smell of brimstone.  But the four people I met (a middle aged woman, and three elderly retired gentlemen)  were as friendly and personable as anyone you could hope to meet.  One guy in his 90s told about his experiences in the Navy in WWII.  He had asked to be allowed to be an aircraft mechanic because he had experience as a mechanic, and because he did not think he could bring himself to shoot anyone.  He talked about using  his GI Bill entitlement to get started farming and to buy his first tractor.  He said he got an Oliver tractor. He wanted a John Deere, but the waiting list was too long.  I asked, "Was this an Oliver 77?"  He said, "No, it was a model 70."  I asked, "Did you burn the valves on it?"  He got a big grin on his face, and replied, "Why, yes!"  He had not imagined that someone my age could have known about the Oliver 70 valve problem.  At last, he had found a kindred spirit.  We talked, quietly, so as not to distract the voters, for the whole 4 hours.  I found that his world view was not so different from my own. He was not a Tea Party lunatic trying to abolish government.  In fact, he freely admitted that without the GI Bill and the Farm Bill,  he might not have attained the success that he now enjoyed. His main worry was the outrageous cost of healthcare, especially long term care. His wife now has Alzheimer's and is in a care facility.  He had been charged $70,000 for one year's care.

            I wondered how on earth someone who had been burned that badly by the private sector insurance and health care providers could support a party that wants only private sector solutions.  My answer is this. Some of these people are like confused tourists in a country that they do not understand--and they have inadvertently gotten on the wrong bus. It is not that their eyesight is too poor to read the signs. Tricksters from rival bus companies have pasted phony signs over the original markings, so as to obscure the information about where some of these busses are heading.  This makes it pretty hard to make an informed choice.  Yet the activist volunteers working with my wife are trying to do the opposite. They try to peel off the false labels and explain to people who really owns each bus, and where it will actually take you.