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By: Alex Koscielski
By: Alex Koscielski
Editor
November 14, 2020
Photo courtesy of ProPublica (subject to change)
My name is Alex Koscielski and on November 3rd, 2020, I worked as an election judge. As a worrying amount of doubt has come up on the security of the election this year, I figured it would be helpful to explain exactly what happens in a polling place. I’ll go through what we do to set-up, how we manage voters, and how we close everything up at the end of the day.
A big part of an election judge's responsibilities is setting up before Election Day. This is the most important thing to do because it’s when we find out if anything is missing or if anything doesn’t work properly. Most judges choose to set up on the Monday before Election Day. We get everything ready as if voters were lining up to vote.
The ePollBooks are set-up and updated with a new list of voter information for the election.
The voting touchscreens are tested, along with the ballot printer and ballot scanner.
The voting booths are set up and the paper ballots are counted to make sure the precinct has enough.
After we check everything and make sure we are ready to go for Tuesday, all equipment is shut-down and stored inside our precinct’s locked box. The only things that stay out overnight are the voting booths. All the election judges have to sign a bunch of bureaucratic papers, and then we head home and set our alarms for 4:00.
On Election Day, we have from 5 to 6 AM to get everything ready for the first ballots to be cast. The check-in station is set up, the touchscreens are turned on, and we basically do everything we did the day before again. Then, at 6:00, the polls open up and people can start voting.
At station one, we check voters in and direct them to vote. Here's how that goes:
Voters are looked up in the ePollBooks by either scanning their ID or manually typing in their name and address.
A label with the voters info is printed out and placed in the Check-in Book.
The voter must sign next to the label and their signature is compared to the one on file.
If the signatures match, the voter chooses to vote by touchscreen or paper.
If they choose a touchscreen, we make them a specialized voter card and send them to a touchscreen.
If they choose paper, we give them a paper ballot and direct them to a voting booth.
Once a voter is done filling out their ballot it gets put through the scanner. If someone votes on a touchscreen, a printer prints out their ballot so that it can be scanned. After that, we give them an "I Voted" sticker and send them on their way. The entire system is very secure, too. If someone tries to vote twice, we get an alert that the voter already voted. If someone doesn't have a signature on file, they vote provisionally, meaning that their vote must be reviewed later by other election officials.
The last thing we do is close up shop when the polls close at 7. Before we put anything away, though, the number of voters we checked in has to match with the number of votes cast. After we confirm that all the number's line-up, we transmit the data from the scanner to the Cook County Clerk's office (this is where all precincts send their data).
And that's really the end of it all. We sign some more documents, put all the voting booths away, shut-down the touchscreens and ePollBooks and lock everything up in our precincts box. The voters vote, the ballots get scanned, and that data gets transmitted straight to the Clerk's office. It's quick, efficient, and, most importantly, it's secure.
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