A republic, if we can keep it

I’d never been a poll worker before, and I signed up to be one for the June 2 primary election with some trepidation. If you’ve ever worked the polls, you know that very few people are doing it for the money. (Poll workers are paid a “stipend,” which works out to less than San Francisco’s hourly minimum wage.)

What we’re doing is our part as members of the “the great body of the people” from whom government is supposed to derive its power. The activity is grueling, and so earnest that it’s almost embarrassing, but I knew it couldn’t be more grueling or embarrassing than what’s on the news every day and decided to roll up my sleeves. Ben Franklin wasn’t being facetious when he said we had a republic, if we could keep it.

Almost 250 years later, Ben’s “if” is doing more work than ever. And I’ll admit, my first thought after finishing the hour-long webinar that was my poll worker training was: “That’s it? I’m qualified to be an official representative of democracy now? Eligible to be turned loose on the electorate with…that?” (No offense to the hard-working SF Elections Office, but I’ve had longer workplace wellness trainings.)

Making matters even more concerning, my poll assignment was the Alice Griffith Apartments, at the very edge of San Francisco. The Alice Griffith Apartments are notorious for the state of their dilapidation and their low-income residents are well-known for their state of disenfranchisement when it comes to city resources and local political consideration. It wasn’t an assignment for the weak.

I showed up at 6 a.m. My fellow poll workers and I were four women of different ages and races and political persuasions and (frankly) mental health statuses, but we were all committed, in our own ways, to the group project. We made our way around the center, clearing heaps of art supplies from folding tables and wiping dust off of folding chairs. We righted voting booths and readied the ballot pads in five languages and were still scrambling to get everything set up when it was time to throw open the doors and shout, “The polls are open!”

And from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., we served every voter who came inside. We sat with disabled voters who needed assistance with the audio-visual machine. We prepared provisional ballots for voters who had lost their housing since registering to vote. We handed voter information guides to the many voters who said they hadn’t had “a chance to do my homework on this ballot.” We consulted our handbooks for guidance when voters came in and asked us to mark their ballots, told us they had forgotten the envelopes for their mail-in ballots, started cussing Trump out in the polling station. (The latter was probably our most informed voter of the day. She knew every single one of that man’s activities, chapter and verse.)

It was a hilarious, humbling, terrifying and fascinating experience, and my biggest moments of terror didn’t come at 9:30 p.m., when I had to hand over ballots to two unsmiling and heavily armed sheriffs. (It’s America! I assume everyone is armed to the teeth!) They came when I ran into a scenario that wasn’t in the handbook FAQs. (The Alice Griffith Apartments presented lots of scenarios that weren’t in the FAQs!) The voters I was helping had all but given up on having their voice counted by anyone in power, and yet they had shown up anyway. They had taken a big chunk of their day to wrestle with a complex and complicated ballot that was crammed with way too many do-nothing candidates and thick with expert-level initiatives no voter would be responsible for deciding in a functioning republic. I was the final link in their attempt to have some power in a profoundly disempowering system, and I wanted their ballots to be counted and for them to feel respected and appreciated.

And you know what? At the beginning of the day, I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. But by the end of the day, I got why I was perfect for this “official representative of democracy” thing. I have common sense, am educated enough to read pamphlets, and possess moderate trust in the good will of regular people. That was all I needed to administer the mission-critical task of voting and in fact, that’s the central point of what we’re doing in this country. The central point is that you, me, all members of the great body of the people are up to the task of designing this experiment we call America. So we better start acting like it.