MY HANDS WERE SLAPPING the bed crazily when my wife suddenly awoke to shut them down. My nightmare had surfaced. Monkeys were popping up at the polling place to stuff ballots or to sneak them out. Like whack-a-mole, I tried to hit them, slapping feverishly as they hopped around from voting booth to booth. My wife thankfully broke the spasmodic spell, and saved me from losing to an army of feverish monkeys trying to subvert our election.
The Election Board itself worried about attracting enough applicants like me to work half days or all day for ten dollars an hour to help guide things along. Turns out they hired me and about 200 other people to staff nine early-voting sites around the county. Everything from laptop operators registering voters, to external and internal line coordinators to greet and assist voters, to sanitation helpers keeping the voting booths and surroundings safe and clean. Masks and sanitizers on hand for all who needed or wanted them.
To keep it all above board, the major political parties sent observers to each site. They did just that, sitting in chairs inside the sites watching, taking notes, and occasionally voicing concerns:
"My big worry is having a bus drop off dozens of people who never voted before," one observer noted, eyeing the parking lot. North Carolina does not require voters to have an ID, just other forms of identification tied to their county address. No dreaded bus has come so far, only 58,000 citizens seeking to have their votes recorded.
Non-party people are the fastest rising group in our county, and throughout North Carolina. Mail-in ballots are phenomenally on the rise -- so far, 780,000, a quadrupling of those recorded at this juncture in 2016. The ballots, once counted on election day, could prove to be decisive in what pollsters call a "toss-up" state.
Among the first-time voters stood Miguel, an outwardly shy 18-year-old who I noticed hanging around the voting lines for two days but reluctant to step in. When he finally did, he said he only voted for president and senator, describing himself as a "non-political" person. I casually mentioned that the Election Board was still looking for temporary staff and maybe he should look to apply. A colleague overheard and took him by the arm. "Follow me," he said, and he did. The next day Miguel had a job, and by day three he had transformed into a highly courteous and helpful staff member. When I next saw him, he was walking an older voter back to his car.
Yet we've had some "issues". Some voters came because their absentee ballots had been blocked for lack of a witness signature; they were allowed to fix them and submit them provisionally. A few wondered whether the pre-filled sample ballot they were handed from party workers was the "real" one. It wasn't, just made to look that way. My boss, the Chief Judge, came out to remind me that party pols had to stay 50 feet away from the voting lines, and then gave me a measuring tape to mark it off exactly. She had heard that some pushy pols were encroaching....
For more, you might want to check in with Ryuichi Kanari, foreign correspondent for Asahi Shimbun, New York bureau. He's on the Trump trail again. His first book in 2017 chronicled conservative American politics in the midwest for Japanese and Korean readers. He had come to North Carolina and Wilmington to see how things were going down south this time around. During a lull in the lines, he asked me whether we'd seen more Trump or Biden voters and whether there had been any problems.
As a non-partisan Election Official, I said there's not much I could tell him on the record. Not even about my monkey nightmare.
