Voting in America – Lessons at the Polls

 “You can observe a lot by watching.”

       -- Philosopher and baseball legend Yogi Berra

I have views on the still-airing resistance to the called outcome of our recent presidential election. For today I forbear – instead with some non-partisan thoughts on my Election Day opportunity to be an on-the-ground participant in our country’s massive suffrage exercise.

With the eventual result a certainty, it’s a relief to take a break from the chattering heads and their maps and charts. Rather, this is to recognize and give respect to the hundreds of thousands of workers in their recording, tabulating and reporting over 150 million individual preferences, during an on-going pandemic that is expanding out of control.

I volunteered as a “poll observer” -- as I’ve done often over the years. My assignment was in a working-class suburb of a small city, once heavily industrialized and now down-at-heels. The political leanings of the residents were doubtless predictable, but it wasn’t for me to ask, nor have I gone back post-election to inquire.

It was just sunrise as I reached my site – a large high-school gymnasium hosting the apparatus for three precincts. Some 25 county staff had already laid out sanitizers, marked waiting queues in colorful tape, and carefully separated check-in tables, voting stations, and tabulating machinery.

Well over a hundred citizens were on line before the 7.00 a.m. opening, to perform their civic ritual on the way to work – a backlog that held into mid-morning and foretold a record turnout.

The day turned out to be calm and orderly, defined by its lack of drama – belying all the outcries of chaos and conspiracy, before and since. Spacing and mask wearing were almost universal; the official position was that the right to vote over-rode mandated masking, so the handful of violators were tolerated with no more than dark looks.

A scattering who displayed partisan hats and sweatshirts were gently persuaded to remove or cover, and the candidate advocates beyond the doors kept their banners and literature at the required distance.

Not least, nobody pushed the policy, litigated in advance, that the state’s right-to-carry law permitted firearms inside the polling places.

One small encounter confirmed the wisdom of legendary Massachusetts legislator Tip O’Neill that “all politics is local”:

My prior experience was that diplomacy of observers is key, being basically interlopers on the fringes of the authorized workers’ demanding tasks. Well-prepared, I introduced myself to the crew chief with the offer of a large bag of donuts – it being conventional that copious quantities of coffee and sugar are the fuel for the energy demands of the entire operation.

Her initial reaction was bright and cheery. Not only did my offering fulfill the traditional protocol -- at the personal level also, her apple-cheeked profile confirmed her close and intimate familiarity with baked goods. But it was not to be. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’re generous to offer. But with the pandemic, we’re not allowed to take in any food from the outside.”

No harm done, and on to work. I checked back later in the morning as the rush eased, to observe turnout figures and ask about issues. “All good,” was her report, “and thanks again for the offer of donuts.”

“Actually,” she said, “the county clerk’s rule on food was that it could be brought in, if you had gone to their office in advance and registered your food and got their permission.”

Pre-registration and a permit requirement for a bag of donuts! Tip O’Neill’s maxim was on full display -- hometown political culture that no stranger could possibly have imagined.

Driving home after my eight-hour shift, and having scrolled the observers’ notes posted to our overseeing state-wide chat room, I pondered several take-aways:  

• Our country’s dispersed, diverse and locally-run voting structure is clunky and inefficient and – like any operation designed and run by fallible human beings – it is subject to a non-zero rate of low-impact errors.

• But the national operation in the aggregate – barely deserving the label of a “system” – is, in the lingo of the scholars of industrial process, “loosely connected.”

• That is, it contrasts with the tightly linked systems that are subject to catastrophic failure when a breakdown of one critical component triggers a cascade of failure – such as a fatal flaw in the launch sequence of a space shuttle, or an intelligence lapse that mistakenly aims a drone attack at a children’s hospital.

Our collective voting methodologies run separately in the individual states, operated locally and staffed by reasonably trained and well-intentioned citizens. The likelihood of widespread and pervasive corruption of that loosely linked aggregation, on a scale significant to affect the overall outcome, is on a pure systems basis so small as to give confidence in its basic integrity and reliability.

Or so I told myself, on my ride home, and as I keep repeating now while waiting for the noise levels to diminish.  

 

It’s not that my usual topics here are dormant -- involving large-company financial information. Concerns there remain widespread and threatening, but are of understandably lowered public priority under the pre-occupying concerns of the pandemic, economic distress and political unrest.

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Comments

[Wolfgang Joensson]

Wonderfully written account. Want to read more of this kind of reportage.

[Duane Kullberg]

Thanks for telling the story of your observations of the great American experiment in action - it may seem sloppy and inefficient - but it works.