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I didn’t vote, but…
I contributed to community politics by helping tally votes. It’s a ridiculously redundant job, but, unfortunately it is necessary. We received all the voting data from a district (? I don’t even know the proper terminology - it was 100-something polling places) on crazy old fashioned cartridges and USB sticks… plugged them into computers that were logged into a VPN and a tallying system that linked up to a server downtown, somewhere. The precincts were supposed to try to upload their results before they brought them to us… but not all of them go through or get done. The downtown people published lists of partially uploaded and missing uploads… we called some of the people who had “partials,” to see if they could try to upload them again, and be sure that they all came to us. Then, what was supposed to happen is we would check the “missing” list and resubmit those packs when they showed up, but the people who were running the place were under the impression that we should just try to reupload everything, regardless of the fact that 90% of them would just pop up an error that said the data was already submitted… rather than get in a fight, we just tried to resubmit everything. When all the polling places had brought their stuff, and we suddenly were the only people left, I decided to check the “missing” list. There were only four missing, from two polling places. So, instead of run every pack from the fifty or so polling station’s bags that we had left, we found the two that needed running, ran them, and then packed everything up. If I do this job, next election, I’ll insist that we NOT do things the hard way for a couple hours, before doing it the way we’re supposed to.
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