Notes From The Polls: Maspeth, Queens
I was a poll worker yesterday
There was a hum in the air all day yesterday, I’m sure you heard it.
I could have done nothing that Tuesday, but an NPR ad in September emboldened me to volunteer as a poll worker. As with any public happening, election day promised an unfiltered view of this slice of Queens, the most linguistically diverse borough on the planet. I figured even just a day spent among my many neighbors could be a rewarding experience somehow.
The night before I had friends from other states tell me to be careful, to be safe. A bartender, my neighbor, and several strangers on the street thanked me for my service as if I were some kind of veteran, walking around wearing my poll worker lanyard like a well-won badge. I did not feel as if I had much honor. Very little about the job felt honorable.
My experience with New York’s public services is that across the board you’re unlikely to find gentle hands. You’re highly likely to find problems created by cheap contractors (that emblematic and pervasive part of New York living that nobody seems to talk about), buttressed by schemes designed by soft-handed fools with no on-the-ground experience.
The other emblematic New York experience of gerrymandering led me to man the table for an election district that, all told, serviced only thirty-one voters on November fifth. My tablemate Yaritza and I speculated that perhaps those constituents voted early, or voted by mail, or didn’t care to vote at all. My usual polling place is in the heart of Ridgewood, but this one was further north, closer to the industrial yards of Maspeth. Upon searching for the election district I was servicing, I found that nearly two-thirds of it was indeed an industrial yard. Yaritza and I only covered three dead-end streets that contained only a handful of walkups each.
The table next to us, on the other hand, serviced nearly five hundred voters that day (perhaps more, I never asked what their final count was). This posed problems from the moment polls opened. Many older folks complained about the line. We offered chairs and fast-tracked those who were referred by other polling places, but unless voters knew their election district upon arrival, they’d have to wait on line to learn which table they belonged to.
This tension reached a marginally disturbing fever pitch by six thirty, when two of our three scanners stopped functioning. A post on the /r/ridgewood subreddit revealed that this problem seemed to be happening across Queens. One commenter announced, “Its an issue with the transparency of the paper. Whomever was responsible for the printing of Queens ballots (I presume an outside vendor) went with a thinner paper. Cause of that, the scanners were reading both sides of the ballot as one page causing it to reject it and give that odd error message. AFAIK, techs have been deployed across Queens to get this error resolved (in the scanner). Now most polling sites should be good. I'm guessing whomever was responsible for testing these ballots got a good batch of ballots or just didn't bother doing anything about it.”
Whether or not it’s true is to be seen, but knowing my own city and my own state… I’m inclined to believe it. It took close to an hour for a tech to service the scanners, and in that time some folks began losing their temper. One man got frustrated when his ballot would not scan. The poll worker moved to assist him, and he blew up. He began shouting that he didn’t want anyone to see his vote (if you voted in New York yesterday, I’m sure you can agree that even from a foot away those ballots are impossible to read, also no one cares bro we’re just tryna get you outta here) and promptly ripped up his ballot. This is a massive problem for poll workers, because each ballot is tracked meticulously through a series of increasingly absurd-sounding checks and balances. One of those checks is voiding ballots, which is rendered painfully difficult when ballots are ripped to pieces.
We voided almost a hundred ballots on election day due to voter error—on a related note: who’s in charge of designing these ballots and can we please make them easier to read, comprehend, and fill out? Nobody seemed to have brought their reading glasses and most people refused magnifiers when offered. The scantron bubbles are too small, the pens we distributed are too inconsistent to reliably fill them in, and why did it become my job to explain that they can’t vote twice just because a candidate is on the ballot twice? I digress.
Design issues are rife throughout the election process in New York, from the voter interfaces to the poll worker training. Nobody is having a good time and nobody totally understands what’s going on. I try not to lean too far into thinking everything is a conspiracy or by design, but there’s dissonance for me when I see such great accessibility options for voting (BMD’s are incredible machines) while the actual process of voting itself is problematic for so many voters. I’m happy to be charitable and believe that in the churn of New York politics, these designs persist as an anachronism, are perhaps something from a bygone era of more overt voter suppression that everyone kept forgetting to update… though I maintain my suspicions that inaction in this regard is very much also by design.
The rest of the day was fairly copacetic, and my job made it easier to stay distracted and dissociated from the Other Things Going On That Day. I had two hour-long breaks. I spent the first running home to change, and my second drinking a pair of beers and listening to Fatboy Slim. But now it’s the day afterwards, and it’s bad news, and I’ve written this little report as an attempt stay in the headspace I was in yesterday: Fired up about righting small local wrongs just to make someone’s life a little easier. Because maybe that’s all we’ve got, and all we ever had in the first place. Perhaps it’s just something I say to feel a little more control.
Til next time —