Elections

November 5th I had to work in the wonderful world of elections.  This was the local city elections for mayor and alderman.  We not only ran the city election for Hardin, but also for Lodge Grass and the Fort Smith Water & Sewer Board.  This year all three elections were by mail ballot.

There are only two of us working in the elections office.  In October we stuffed and labeled about 3000 ballots and got them in the mail on October 10.  In each envelope sent to the voters was the ballot, secrecy envelope, affirmation envelope and instructions.  I had the idea to color code the secrecy envelopes for sorting.  Hardin has three wards and an alderman in each was up, then we had Lodge Grass and the Water & Sewer, this would make it easier for sorting when ballots came in.  One less thing to do on election night.

This year it was only the two of us for the day.  We did have some judges come in to help count ballots, we got enough to run two tables for counting.  There is a lot to do on elections, a lot of prep work to do the day before, not to mention getting people registered and people picking up their ballots.  Dulcie (the elections administrator) got sick on Monday (a touch of food poisoning).  I sent her home on Monday afternoon, she wasn't any help to me at all.  She ended up in the emergency room Monday night so that she could work on Tuesday.  I was so glad.

Tuesday was a long day.  We had to have the elections office open as if it were a poll election, which meant 7:00 am.  Tuesday we had quite a bit of people coming in to register and vote, mostly because they moved and didn't change their address.  I am not a fan of same day registration, but for a local city it wasn't bad at all.  We did have 6 people come to register in the last hour from 7:00-8:00 pm to vote.  I wanted so bad to slap them on the side of their heads and say really. 

Once 8:00 pm rolled then we were allowed by law to open up the ballot boxes and start counting.  The judges were so glad that I thought up of color coding.  It made the counting of ballot so easy.

We had all the ballots counted and results done by 10:30 pm, Dulcie and I didn't get done until 11:00 pm as we had to do our last minute stuff, sealing up envelopes with the tally books, voted ballots, unvoted ballots.  We put in a 16 hour day, has been along time since I have worked those kind of hours, but will be doing more since I now work part time elections.

With the results there were a few surprises but not many.  In the Lodge Grass alderman race there was one person who was an undeclared write in who almost won, lost by 2 votes.  I wonder if this person knew if they were running for the office.  I asked about that and was told that if this person did win, would have the option to accept or decline.  If accepted would then need to fill out all the proper paperwork and pay filing fees.

Now we get to get ready for the federal election in 2014.  I am excited because we have a new ballot counting machine which will be getting training on in January, then in February will be going to a conference in Billings on election laws and such.  Not looking forward to it because it is all the local county offices that are up but one.