By Ellen Meyers
Buoyed by the four-hour training that was extremely well-delivered and armed with a comprehensive handout that I probably should have spent a moment reviewing, I was fairly confident that poll working would go smoothly. I was impressed that democracy in action at this level appeared well-polished.
So my biggest concern was facing a 16½-hour day that had the potential to be stultifying. I packed a book.
After a restless sleep made worse by the very recent clock change, I got out of bed way too early. I arrived at the church, Water Mill’s polling site, at 4:53 a.m., seven minutes before the appointed time. There was not another car in the lot.
Although it was dark and cold — pitch black and freezing! — I decided to venture out to see if there was an open entrance to the church. Because all doors were locked and all windows unlit on the parking lot side of the church, I made my way around to what I was hoping was its front. There was no walkway, so I stumbled along the lawn until I fell into a hole. I had visions of sci-fi! Here I was being catapulted to another universe, hopefully, better than this one.
I climbed out of the hole and, shivering from the cold, made my way back to the parking lot. Other cars started to arrive.
As each one made its way into a parking spot, I optimistically got of my car to see if maybe this person was less clueless than me. No one was.
At about 5:15 a.m., I started calling the Suffolk County Board of Elections. After a few tries, I got through. Shouting through background noise, the person who picked up took the information, including my name and number, and said he would get back to me.
My confidence in the system started to wane.
At one point, a man knocked on my car door to ask if I was Elizabeth. Turned out someone named Elizabeth had “the suitcase.”
For the next hour or so, I would alternate between calling the Board of Elections and knocking on car windows to see if there was someone in charge. Each poll supposedly had a coordinator, and I was desperate to find ours — especially after a man rolled down his window, looking really annoyed, and told me he was there to vote.
A distressed poll worker told me she had to pee. I got a kick out of this, because she was the first person I had ever met whose first words to me were, “I have to pee.”
Still in the dark — and in the dark! — and now past the official opening time of the polls, the church opened. We all headed in, fortunately wearing masks, because there was no attempt at social distancing. It was a mob scene that miraculously sorted itself out into two lines of voters, one snaking outside and one heading up the stairs inside to the front door of the church. We were on a bottom level.
Now in the polling place, with the time edging toward 6:30 a.m., I tried to gain some understanding of how we were setting up. An elderly couple — turned out to be two of our handful of Republicans and among the very few who had experience poll working — were busy putting up an American flag. There was a woman who was, indeed, Elizabeth, although she had denied it when Jamie, the man who had knocked on my car door, asked her if that was her name.
When Jamie told me about what happened, he was in disbelief that she would not admit that she was Elizabeth.
Elizabeth did seem to have an idea of what to do, because she did have “the suitcase.” However, although she was moving with some purpose, she wouldn’t talk to anyone. So we were all on our own to figure out how to be useful.
A few of us started opening boxes containing the tabulators. These are the iPads used to check in voters. They are packed in pieces. Fortunately, Tess, although also a neophyte poll worker, is a millennial, so she had no problem figuring out how to assemble them, so we did.
In the meantime, I looked at the line that was going out the door, and people looked miserable. I thought it might help their moods if they could sit. I located a stack of chairs, brought them to the line, and started unstacking them, when a man said, “If we sit in those chairs, we will never get up.”
They were children’s chairs.
As I was restacking them, a man from the top of stairs in the other line came down and told me that his wife had three fractured ribs and had reached the limit of her pain tolerance. I told him as soon as we opened the polls, I would come get her. While he didn’t look particularly satisfied, he did head back up the stairs.
Then, a man near the front of the other line told me that there was going to be a problem — as if there weren’t enough already! — because he was standing in the line they always stood in to vote, and the people in the other line would end up cutting into their line. When I approached the other line, a man insisted his was the official line.
Then the man on the other line told me I’d better lock the front door of the church to put an end to the line going up the stairs. He told me to get the key under the mat.
So I traipsed up the stairs, glad to take direction from someone, although not confident that I was on the right team.
When I went back downstairs and told him there was no key under the mat, he gave me a truly disgusted look, marched me back up the stairs, and showed me the correct mat — the one outside the door, not the one inside the door. He might have been the one initially to open the church door, or maybe all the voters knew where the key was hidden. I know none of the poll workers did.
I put the key in my pocket.
Back downstairs, astonishingly, albeit 45 minutes late, the poll was open. I immediately headed back upstairs to find the woman with the fractured ribs. When I told her to follow me, she blanched and said there was no way she could cut the line. They did look scary, but I said, “People, this woman needs to vote now.” Fortunately, no one said a word as the two of us headed downstairs.
For the next several hours, I was signing people in nonstop, so I never did see how the two lines merged. What I did see was an endless parade of people with a lot of the same last names: the Halseys, the Fosters, the Corwiths, the Squires, etc. The old ones came with their aides, the young with children on their hips. They are breeders, and they live forever!
It was a steady stream of Republicans, with very few Democrats sprinkled in. Trump told them to vote in person on Election Day, and they heeded his command.
When one voter, an older man wearing camouflage, reached in his breast pocket as I was signing him in, I asked if he was going to pull out a gun. He responded, “No, my glasses.”
Nothing would have surprised me after four years of ongoing shocks to the system.
Maybe it was crazy energy from lack of sleep. Maybe it was the fun of being in a crowd — any crowd — after months of COVID-19 deprivation. Maybe it was relief from our success in opening the poll.
It turned out that we were never assigned a coordinator because ours is a small poll with only one machine. The assistant coordinator, Elizabeth, was pissed off all day because she said she wasn’t told she was in charge. The one time I tried to talk to her, she went on about the good old days of poll watching and how the new people weren’t being properly trained. She had one huge chip on her shoulder.
At any rate, in between constantly dealing with voters throughout the morning, I introduced myself to everyone and told them we were going to be the best polling spot on the East End, that we would be rated No. 1 in Dan’s Papers (he rates everything) for the most fun poll workers.
For whatever reason, for the first time in days, I was feeling okay. I didn’t even hate the Republicans. They just seemed like people. I even had a peppy interchange with old Mr. Halsey, whose family farm stand I shop at practically daily. When he remarked that we seemed to be having a good time, I told him, “That’s because we eat your corn, your beets, your lettuce.” He seemed to get a kick out of it. I know that I did.
When Julie Ratner came at noon to bring me two containers of soup and a huge box of granola bars for the poll workers, I made a little speech to my fellow poll workers by introducing her to everyone as the woman who did more for breast cancer than anyone else on the East End. Beverly, the woman who had to pee, got very excited, because she said she needed a mammogram. She gratefully accepted one of the hot soups. We were all chilled from having to leave the door open all day to take at least some COVID precaution.
When the number of voters dropped to a drip, and we had hit 500 out of the registered 900, I guessed correctly that we had seen the bulk of the action, and it was only midafternoon, with hours to go. Andy and Wally stopped in to say hi around 3 p.m. When I told Andy that all I was doing was enabling the Republican vote, he quipped, “Close the poll.”
My mood began to darken when I began thinking that where I have been living the past eight months, while beautiful, might as well be Middle America.
The East End is full of Latinos who seem to do all of the manual labor, but there were only four voters all day who weren’t white. An artist did come to vote who brought a roll of stickers that he designed saying, “I voted on the East End.” We gave them out to the mostly Republican voters.
Marilyn, who runs kayaking trips — I have done a couple — wasn’t particularly friendly and looked really frazzled. There was one woman whom I thought I could be friends with. When I commented on her string of pearls, she told me RBG said to wear them.
I spent a fair amount of time talking to my fellow poll workers: Jaime, a veteran and truck driver, who recently has made Riverhead his home; Jack, who seemed to know everyone, mentioned his husband, and turned out to be a real estate broker; Tess, whom I startled when she responded to my question about where she went to high school by saying I would not have heard of it, and I told her not only did I know it but it turned out that one of our Hope Reichbach Fellows was in the class ahead of hers; Beverly, who had to pee, recently moved here full time from the city and told me she would be inviting me to tea since she will be alone for the rest of her life (she has already called); Michael, a Republican, who, when I mentioned how great it would be to have hot coffee, went out and came back with a huge container of coffee for everyone, and whose wife showed up later in the day with bags of Tate’s cookies; Ken, who was reading one of Robert Caro’s LBJ books, which gave us something to talk about; and Jeff, who is a landscape architect/contractor for the 1 percent, which gave me an opportunity to get some pleasure by giving him a hard time. He was a good sport and was my co-witness for the day, so, sitting side by side, we talked a lot.
When I started to feel sad about my own losses, listening to him talk about his family and how much pleasure he gets from them, he revealed that his oldest daughter is a quadriplegic. He then went on to tell me a story that I could only half hear, because I was busy absorbing his tragedy. By the time he reached its conclusion, which had to do with having perspective, tears were running down his cheeks. Then he showed me a picture of all of his kids. Lovely and heartbreaking.
The hours dragged on, and by the time we had closed up and headed for home at around 9:30 p.m., I was chilled to the bone and my head was pounding. The headache lasted for two days.
Ellen Meyers is a resident of Water Mill.
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