Less than a month ago, I took the training offered through my county to become an election judge. I signed up for that training by contacting the county auditor/treasurer who has the duty to administer elections, and I also had to go through our township clerk, who administers the precinct in which I live, because I had indicated I wanted to work in that precinct, but some election judges end up serving in other precincts, for a variety of reasons.
The regular training was two hours long, of pretty compressed content; by that, I mean every possible topic was covered, thoroughly, but it moved along pretty briskly. There was time allowed for questions and answer. Many of the people in our class were previous election judges; some of them with decades of experience, including two who remarked on one questionable voter they had known personally, and reported to the County Attorney for voting in the wrong precinct after the election, but who was allowed to vote in the last election.
There were roughly 40 people in my class, which was one of I believe 18 sessions of the training offered by my county. It is my understanding that every election, no matter how experienced, EVERYBODY goes through at least the basic 2 hour training. I didn't get the impression there was a lot of turn over in election judges, but rather that the overwhelming majority do it every election. There is not a high turnover rate, apparently, and this is apparently fairly typical across the state as a general observation. Some of the people I actually worked with, but who were not in my class session, had served as election judges for decades, between thirty and forty years.
I took the extra hour of training which was required to be a head election judge; most of that training involved hands on experience with trouble shooting the equipment used in the election. That involved the ballot counting equipment, and a device that is an auto-marker, which allows disabled people to mark their ballots without an individual assisting them if they so desire. It can provide ballot assistance by voice, it has keys for Braille, it has a screen that can enlarge the type face on the ballot to gi-normous, and it can reverse the type so it shows up white on a dark background, which is apparently helpful for people who suffer from a particular type of vision difficulty associated with macular degeneration. It has a lot of bells and whistles, but it is a pain in the butt to actually use. We were given the advice however that for the primary election, where one cannot cross over between the two parties in voting, when someone is having problems repeatedly spoiling a ballot so that it cannot properly be counted by the ballot counting equipment, to steer people to the auto mark because it only lets them choose one or the other party, and will prevent additional spoiled ballots.
We also had a magnifying glass available for any individual who found a ballot difficult to read.
During my shift, we had five spoiled ballots. One person didn't get their ballot properly marked until the third try; two others simply made mistakes. Spoiled ballots are kept in a separate file, but ALL of them are kept.
The day of the primary, I had the early shift - I was assigned to be at our polling place at 6:30 for polls opening at 7 a.m., along with one other person. A few other people were assigned at 6, to prep the polling place. Two of us were not necessary for that part, but our shifts overlapped the majority shift change, so that transitions would be easier, if we were really busy at the shift change hour. Two of our judges were a husband and wife couple. It used to be that they couldn't serve in the same precinct in an election, so one of them would go to the next nearest town, some 5-8 miles away. Now they are allowed to serve in the same precinct, but not on the same shift. The wife was the other judge with whom I counted and initialed ballots. She and her husband have been election judges for decades. I was the only new person, the first addition in quite a while.
My contribution to the opening of the polling place was to count the ballots in the package, and to then be one of the two judges to initial each ballot. They are slightly heavier than regular typing or copy paper, so it often feels like you have two stuck together. One of the election judges helping to open the polls recalled an election a few years earlier (few being more like 8 or 10) where two ballots HAD stuck together, resulting in the ballot count being off by 1, which took them 4 hours longer to resolve than would otherwise have been necessary to close the polls and go home after the election, so I and the other election judge entrusted with initialing ballots were told to be very accurate, and take as long as we needed to do so to be sure every pack matched up properly in number.
Yes, THIS is the exciting kind of jobs entailed in election judging. If you dislike detail work, it will drive you nuts. If you have a low threshold for boredom, you will be climbing the walls very quickly. If you're not a people person........don't do this, you'll hate it. But the people who volunteer to do this work were very pleasant, and that made it much less tedious to do.
I learned that the past two primaries, since the dates were moved back into August from September have been significantly lower in turnout, and ours was from the September numbers. It was a gorgeous day, and I'm sure there were voters who preferred to head for the golf course or other activities if they could get away from working etc. I learned that the number of ballots we were provided expanded by 10% on the previous primary, to account for possible increases in population of people who had turned 18 in the interim. I don't know if that is the formula used by other areas, but I do know that a shortage of ballots has not been a significant problem. I haven't found any election judges personally who have experienced that problem in Minnesota but I don't claim to have met every election judge, obviously. However unlike other states, a ballot shortage isn't a significantly reported problem. In states where ballot shortages do occur, they have tended to be Republicans shorting Democratic leaning voting districts, btw.
So after the ballot counting and initialing took place, and the official declamation of the polls being officially opened after all appropriate signage inside and out had been installed, including the flag put in place - a requirement - we unlocked the doors and ........waited. I had indicated that I would like to rotate through the different tasks, but instead I ended up spending the entire day checking people in with the voter roster.
The top ranking head judge/township clerk, a veteran of decades of elections, took care of same day registration, of which we had zero. Although one elderly couple was brought in by their daughter to register. Maps were brought out, precinct boundaries were checked, and every possible bit of minutiae was verified. Our polling place was actually closer to where the elderly couple lived, as they were near the border between the precincts, which was why their daughter made the mistake of bringing them to our location. The essence of the registration was resolved quite efficiently, but due to the low turnout, the clarification was in some small measure, part of the social aspect of the community as well as just the business of voting.
I had one of the books, the registered voter roster, for the first part of the alphabet. Part of familiarizing myself with it, prior to the anticlimactic opening of the doors, was to go through it page by page. The point was to check to see if we had any names which included indicators of the numeric identifier for a different school district. Some precincts included parts of four school districts; ours was almost entirely one school district, with a small area that belonged to another school district that overlapped our jurisdiction. After checking every entry on every page in the roster, we concluded that every name was in the same school district.
But because voter turnout was low and slow, we also checked all of our maps. The conclusion of the combined judges who had, with the exception of myself, each lived in the area for multiple decades, was that the area was definitively farm fields, without any residence on it that would belong to the other school district. There wasn't a ballot issue for the school district or any school board elections etc. on the primary ballot, but this was in part in anticipation of there being something on the general election ballot in November.
The other purpose in going through the roster was to look for notations of a voter challenge. In my book, the one covering the first part of the alphabet, there were four. One was a married couple, listed at the same address, with the notation of mail returned. Several of the judges had seen the couple in the past week, and could verify that they still lived at that address. A third entry was also a notation of mail returned. And one entry had a felony notation. Special verification was required if one of those individuals presented themselves to vote; none of them did, during my shift. That verification by the head election judge would have required some questions to clarify the challenge to affirm appropriate legal voting status, and in the case of the felon notation, confirmation would be sought from the county auditor's office, which would verify with any other office or agency whatever was necessary.
None of those people, or anyone with a notation in any of the other voter roster books showed up during my shift, which covered the first half of the day. However, the notations DID present the opportunity to bone up on some of the finer points of getting people signed in on the rosters before they were directed to the person handing them voters their ballots in the secret ballot plastic sleeve.
Again, out came the various maps with the official boundaries of the precincts outlined on them. It turns out that there were a few houses that had changed the precincts in which they fell. We had very badly damaging storms since the 2010 election. The houses hadn't moved; there wasn't any Wizard-of-Oz activity, but one house in our precinct that was located on a corner lot HAD changed where their garage was rebuilt, and where their driveway came out to the road. This changed the street on which their address was located. They had not moved, but when that address change had occurred, they had not updated their voter registration. I don't think that would have occurred to me to do either if I hadn't moved from the same house. That was the explanation for one registration with a returned mail notation. Another house was right on the dividing line of the precinct boundary; while those people had previously voted in the adjoining precinct, this year they had to vote in our jurisdiction, because someone with more patience than I have made the legal distinction that where the bedrooms are in the house, rather than living rooms or other rooms are located, was the determining factor in assigning them to their voting precinct. (Our head judge had gone to a further special training session as did other clerks or persons with his responsibility, in St. Cloud.)
By the time we worked through those several notations, and heard some of the highlights of the minutiae covered in the other training session above and beyond the head judge training I took, I can perfectly understand the kinds of challenges to proper versus improper voting that can occur, including people voting accidentally in the wrong precinct on some technical change. I can see how some kinds of clerical errors could occur as well, but none of those would constitute errors that would invalidate an election, or constitute theft of an election, or any form of voter fraud, deception, or outright illegality. I have a much better understanding now of exactly what kind of challenged voter registrations for previously registered voters or even same day voters can occur.
What I learned from my participation in a low turnout primary, but one that uses the same voter registration lists as the larger general election, and which operate in exactly the same way by the same rules and procedures in larger elections, is that we have very careful, accurate, and sometimes technically complicated by-the-rules elections. What we don't have is voter fraud, or any election problem that would be improved by voter ID or the other very partisan changes that are being pushed on Minnesota. What each of those changes would do is to harm the integrity of one voter / one vote elections, and would consistently and exclusively help Republicans by eliminating Democratic voters --- along with disenfranchising some Republican voters as well.
It doesn't particularly surprise me that a group that starts out with a preconceived assumption, and no particular qualification in training to interpret data or to understand proper scientific processes, like the Minnesota Majority and the other voter fraud promoting groups; they get their facts wrong.
I would suggest anyone taking an objective view of their work first familiarize themselves with cognitive bias. Here is a short list from the wikipedia entry for cognitive bias, which provides an excellent introduction to the topic:
Framing by using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
Hindsight bias, sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions; this is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
Self-serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
Belief bias is when one's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
This list is only a partial one of cognitive bias; but as wikipedia noted, these are some of the most commonly studied, and therefore better documented examples of it.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist or some other kind of genius to understand that the organizations trying to find voter fraud in Minnesota are wrong, that they are not proficient or well trained, they are not authoritative in election law and election procedure, and that they are distorting data, and in some cases just plain making shit up, to try to support their claims, not because there is election fraud - there isn't. I don't consider 1 in 15 million to be worth considering as election fraud.
But because they desperately want to believe there is, they will do anything to try to prove the non-existent. These are the same people who tend to be birthers, tenthers, truthers, deathers, and all the other conspiracy theorists. It wouldn't surprise me if the believed there were Aliens in area 51, that the moon landing was faked, or that they believed in Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, or that Elvis is still alive either.
Believing in voter fraud is that kind of crazy, wrong, factually inaccurate, and lacking in a basis in objective reality. Sadly, that now makes it right wing, that now makes it a conservative ideology-driven delusion.
If you have any prayer of being taken seriously on the topic of voter fraud, do your homework on the subject, don't get your information from the lunatic fringe. If you sincerely care about this country, if you want our elections to be honest, get corrupt money out -- and go vote, and go volunteer in your own community to be an election judge. But don't disenfranchise others. Don't spend millions that could be better spent on much more legitimate issues like repairing bridges before they fall down.
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
The regular training was two hours long, of pretty compressed content; by that, I mean every possible topic was covered, thoroughly, but it moved along pretty briskly. There was time allowed for questions and answer. Many of the people in our class were previous election judges; some of them with decades of experience, including two who remarked on one questionable voter they had known personally, and reported to the County Attorney for voting in the wrong precinct after the election, but who was allowed to vote in the last election.
There were roughly 40 people in my class, which was one of I believe 18 sessions of the training offered by my county. It is my understanding that every election, no matter how experienced, EVERYBODY goes through at least the basic 2 hour training. I didn't get the impression there was a lot of turn over in election judges, but rather that the overwhelming majority do it every election. There is not a high turnover rate, apparently, and this is apparently fairly typical across the state as a general observation. Some of the people I actually worked with, but who were not in my class session, had served as election judges for decades, between thirty and forty years.
I took the extra hour of training which was required to be a head election judge; most of that training involved hands on experience with trouble shooting the equipment used in the election. That involved the ballot counting equipment, and a device that is an auto-marker, which allows disabled people to mark their ballots without an individual assisting them if they so desire. It can provide ballot assistance by voice, it has keys for Braille, it has a screen that can enlarge the type face on the ballot to gi-normous, and it can reverse the type so it shows up white on a dark background, which is apparently helpful for people who suffer from a particular type of vision difficulty associated with macular degeneration. It has a lot of bells and whistles, but it is a pain in the butt to actually use. We were given the advice however that for the primary election, where one cannot cross over between the two parties in voting, when someone is having problems repeatedly spoiling a ballot so that it cannot properly be counted by the ballot counting equipment, to steer people to the auto mark because it only lets them choose one or the other party, and will prevent additional spoiled ballots.
We also had a magnifying glass available for any individual who found a ballot difficult to read.
During my shift, we had five spoiled ballots. One person didn't get their ballot properly marked until the third try; two others simply made mistakes. Spoiled ballots are kept in a separate file, but ALL of them are kept.
The day of the primary, I had the early shift - I was assigned to be at our polling place at 6:30 for polls opening at 7 a.m., along with one other person. A few other people were assigned at 6, to prep the polling place. Two of us were not necessary for that part, but our shifts overlapped the majority shift change, so that transitions would be easier, if we were really busy at the shift change hour. Two of our judges were a husband and wife couple. It used to be that they couldn't serve in the same precinct in an election, so one of them would go to the next nearest town, some 5-8 miles away. Now they are allowed to serve in the same precinct, but not on the same shift. The wife was the other judge with whom I counted and initialed ballots. She and her husband have been election judges for decades. I was the only new person, the first addition in quite a while.
My contribution to the opening of the polling place was to count the ballots in the package, and to then be one of the two judges to initial each ballot. They are slightly heavier than regular typing or copy paper, so it often feels like you have two stuck together. One of the election judges helping to open the polls recalled an election a few years earlier (few being more like 8 or 10) where two ballots HAD stuck together, resulting in the ballot count being off by 1, which took them 4 hours longer to resolve than would otherwise have been necessary to close the polls and go home after the election, so I and the other election judge entrusted with initialing ballots were told to be very accurate, and take as long as we needed to do so to be sure every pack matched up properly in number.
Yes, THIS is the exciting kind of jobs entailed in election judging. If you dislike detail work, it will drive you nuts. If you have a low threshold for boredom, you will be climbing the walls very quickly. If you're not a people person........don't do this, you'll hate it. But the people who volunteer to do this work were very pleasant, and that made it much less tedious to do.
I learned that the past two primaries, since the dates were moved back into August from September have been significantly lower in turnout, and ours was from the September numbers. It was a gorgeous day, and I'm sure there were voters who preferred to head for the golf course or other activities if they could get away from working etc. I learned that the number of ballots we were provided expanded by 10% on the previous primary, to account for possible increases in population of people who had turned 18 in the interim. I don't know if that is the formula used by other areas, but I do know that a shortage of ballots has not been a significant problem. I haven't found any election judges personally who have experienced that problem in Minnesota but I don't claim to have met every election judge, obviously. However unlike other states, a ballot shortage isn't a significantly reported problem. In states where ballot shortages do occur, they have tended to be Republicans shorting Democratic leaning voting districts, btw.
So after the ballot counting and initialing took place, and the official declamation of the polls being officially opened after all appropriate signage inside and out had been installed, including the flag put in place - a requirement - we unlocked the doors and ........waited. I had indicated that I would like to rotate through the different tasks, but instead I ended up spending the entire day checking people in with the voter roster.
The top ranking head judge/township clerk, a veteran of decades of elections, took care of same day registration, of which we had zero. Although one elderly couple was brought in by their daughter to register. Maps were brought out, precinct boundaries were checked, and every possible bit of minutiae was verified. Our polling place was actually closer to where the elderly couple lived, as they were near the border between the precincts, which was why their daughter made the mistake of bringing them to our location. The essence of the registration was resolved quite efficiently, but due to the low turnout, the clarification was in some small measure, part of the social aspect of the community as well as just the business of voting.
I had one of the books, the registered voter roster, for the first part of the alphabet. Part of familiarizing myself with it, prior to the anticlimactic opening of the doors, was to go through it page by page. The point was to check to see if we had any names which included indicators of the numeric identifier for a different school district. Some precincts included parts of four school districts; ours was almost entirely one school district, with a small area that belonged to another school district that overlapped our jurisdiction. After checking every entry on every page in the roster, we concluded that every name was in the same school district.
But because voter turnout was low and slow, we also checked all of our maps. The conclusion of the combined judges who had, with the exception of myself, each lived in the area for multiple decades, was that the area was definitively farm fields, without any residence on it that would belong to the other school district. There wasn't a ballot issue for the school district or any school board elections etc. on the primary ballot, but this was in part in anticipation of there being something on the general election ballot in November.
The other purpose in going through the roster was to look for notations of a voter challenge. In my book, the one covering the first part of the alphabet, there were four. One was a married couple, listed at the same address, with the notation of mail returned. Several of the judges had seen the couple in the past week, and could verify that they still lived at that address. A third entry was also a notation of mail returned. And one entry had a felony notation. Special verification was required if one of those individuals presented themselves to vote; none of them did, during my shift. That verification by the head election judge would have required some questions to clarify the challenge to affirm appropriate legal voting status, and in the case of the felon notation, confirmation would be sought from the county auditor's office, which would verify with any other office or agency whatever was necessary.
None of those people, or anyone with a notation in any of the other voter roster books showed up during my shift, which covered the first half of the day. However, the notations DID present the opportunity to bone up on some of the finer points of getting people signed in on the rosters before they were directed to the person handing them voters their ballots in the secret ballot plastic sleeve.
Again, out came the various maps with the official boundaries of the precincts outlined on them. It turns out that there were a few houses that had changed the precincts in which they fell. We had very badly damaging storms since the 2010 election. The houses hadn't moved; there wasn't any Wizard-of-Oz activity, but one house in our precinct that was located on a corner lot HAD changed where their garage was rebuilt, and where their driveway came out to the road. This changed the street on which their address was located. They had not moved, but when that address change had occurred, they had not updated their voter registration. I don't think that would have occurred to me to do either if I hadn't moved from the same house. That was the explanation for one registration with a returned mail notation. Another house was right on the dividing line of the precinct boundary; while those people had previously voted in the adjoining precinct, this year they had to vote in our jurisdiction, because someone with more patience than I have made the legal distinction that where the bedrooms are in the house, rather than living rooms or other rooms are located, was the determining factor in assigning them to their voting precinct. (Our head judge had gone to a further special training session as did other clerks or persons with his responsibility, in St. Cloud.)
By the time we worked through those several notations, and heard some of the highlights of the minutiae covered in the other training session above and beyond the head judge training I took, I can perfectly understand the kinds of challenges to proper versus improper voting that can occur, including people voting accidentally in the wrong precinct on some technical change. I can see how some kinds of clerical errors could occur as well, but none of those would constitute errors that would invalidate an election, or constitute theft of an election, or any form of voter fraud, deception, or outright illegality. I have a much better understanding now of exactly what kind of challenged voter registrations for previously registered voters or even same day voters can occur.
What I learned from my participation in a low turnout primary, but one that uses the same voter registration lists as the larger general election, and which operate in exactly the same way by the same rules and procedures in larger elections, is that we have very careful, accurate, and sometimes technically complicated by-the-rules elections. What we don't have is voter fraud, or any election problem that would be improved by voter ID or the other very partisan changes that are being pushed on Minnesota. What each of those changes would do is to harm the integrity of one voter / one vote elections, and would consistently and exclusively help Republicans by eliminating Democratic voters --- along with disenfranchising some Republican voters as well.
It doesn't particularly surprise me that a group that starts out with a preconceived assumption, and no particular qualification in training to interpret data or to understand proper scientific processes, like the Minnesota Majority and the other voter fraud promoting groups; they get their facts wrong.
I would suggest anyone taking an objective view of their work first familiarize themselves with cognitive bias. Here is a short list from the wikipedia entry for cognitive bias, which provides an excellent introduction to the topic:
Framing by using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
Hindsight bias, sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions; this is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
Self-serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
Belief bias is when one's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
This list is only a partial one of cognitive bias; but as wikipedia noted, these are some of the most commonly studied, and therefore better documented examples of it.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist or some other kind of genius to understand that the organizations trying to find voter fraud in Minnesota are wrong, that they are not proficient or well trained, they are not authoritative in election law and election procedure, and that they are distorting data, and in some cases just plain making shit up, to try to support their claims, not because there is election fraud - there isn't. I don't consider 1 in 15 million to be worth considering as election fraud.
But because they desperately want to believe there is, they will do anything to try to prove the non-existent. These are the same people who tend to be birthers, tenthers, truthers, deathers, and all the other conspiracy theorists. It wouldn't surprise me if the believed there were Aliens in area 51, that the moon landing was faked, or that they believed in Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, or that Elvis is still alive either.
Believing in voter fraud is that kind of crazy, wrong, factually inaccurate, and lacking in a basis in objective reality. Sadly, that now makes it right wing, that now makes it a conservative ideology-driven delusion.
If you have any prayer of being taken seriously on the topic of voter fraud, do your homework on the subject, don't get your information from the lunatic fringe. If you sincerely care about this country, if you want our elections to be honest, get corrupt money out -- and go vote, and go volunteer in your own community to be an election judge. But don't disenfranchise others. Don't spend millions that could be better spent on much more legitimate issues like repairing bridges before they fall down.
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
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