My Experience As A Polling Official

I had the pleasure of being a Polling Election Official for the May 2018 primary here in Ohio. It is a gubanatorial / midterm year. It felt like people have been talking about the midterms for almost a year already. It seems that someone is always running for some sort of office.

The precinct I worked was at the leasing office of an apartment complex and is once of the smaller precincts of approximately 1,000 registered voters. I wasn’t able to find out how many people participated in early voting, but between the hours of 6:30am and 7:30pm, only 67 voters came in to vote.

My specific position was as a Machine Judge, so I would log people into the electronic voting machine according to their party affiliation and ensure they they fully submitted their ballot. Overall the voters were very polite but but I”m not sure if they were completely informed of the nuanced differences in the candidates. Since in Ohio, you’re only voting “issues only” or for your own registered party in a primary, it seemed that most people were simply “ok” with the choices in front of them.

The result was that for the Republicatn and Democrat parties, very bland, “more of the same” type of candidates are going on to the general election. That might be a better situation than really fringe candidates moving on, but certainly not by much.

As far as the responsibilities of Polling Officials, every single more that we made was documented and turned in at the end of the day. Members of the board of elections stopped by each precinct multiple times during the day. Numbers of voters had to be audited multiple times a day. When any of us went to lunch, at least one member of an alternate political party needed to be present so that there were members of multiple parties were in the polling location at all times.

It was mundane. It went exactly as it was supposed to go. The way I see it, if there was any potential for fraud, I just don’t know how far it could go because of the multiple different ways all the data was backed up and transmitted and cross-referenced. Regardless, it was a good experience and I certainly will be doing it again in the future and would really enjoy experiencing a much busier precinct.