I may as well make a thread about this since I'd like to talk about it...

I may as well make a thread about this since I'd like to talk about it. I made a couple threads about it leading up to the day, so you may recall. I'll try to summarize:

Since quite honestly 8ch is the majority of my social interaction these days I thought I'd share my story here, the few vaguely amusing things that happened at the polls, and answer any questions anyone might have about the process.

I got home around 10, then stayed up listening to Jim's stream until Trump was officially declared the winner and went to sleep with a smile on my face.

What do you want?

Before I did the job, I had a couple weeks of bullshit to go through. You may have seen a thread titled "I Don't Exist" a few days ago. Because I'd stayed in seclusion long enough that my ID expired, and rent an apartment that officially doesn't exist according to the government I didn't exist and would have to apply for a new ID as if I'd never had one. They required my social security card and birth certificate, but to apply for either of those would have required a valid ID, and none of the government workers cared about this bullshit catch-22. You'd think my face and fingerprints would have been enough to prove my identity, but not so. Still, I got the documents and renewed my ID in time to get the job.

A day before the in person training I finally got off my ass and did the online training. It was a ton of jargon I could barely understand, and it was basically 32 "modules" of technical terms -many of which turned out not to even apply to the job- followed by a 50 question test on everything in the previous modules. I was told finishing it would get me an extra dollar an hour in compensation, but that may have been BS. It took me a day to get that done.

The following day I did the in person training because I felt like if I didn't I'd have absolutely no idea what I was doing, and when it was done I more or less had a pretty good idea what to do.

Considering I'm basically a neet and had been going to sleep around 5am before this, the new schedule was quite draining.

Just to talk about this and post Trump cuties.

Night before the election as much as I tried, I didn't get any sleep. I was up at 4:30 and got there at exactly 5:55. I worked as a clerk from 6am to 9pm. We have an hour to set up before the polls open (7am to 7pm) and whoever's in line before 7pm gets to be let in to vote. Then the last two hours consisted of taking everything we put together back apart and counting the ballots.

I just tried to smile a lot and speak clearly, but I have a very deep, soft voice, so I ended up repeating myself a lot. My coworkers all certainly tried to be nice, but I was too much of a sperg to effectively socialize with them, and just laughed and smiled at their jokes and answered their questions generally with only one sentence answers and rarely making direct eye contact.

The last few hours sucked and I came reasonably close to embarrassing myself because of a bad decision I'd made. My sciatica started acting up, and I wanted so badly to be prepared I made my lunch and put it in my lunch bag four days ahead of time. The food all tasted fine, but by 7pm my stomach was making some profoundly evil noises.

Besides lugging stuff around, I primarily had three jobs. First I was just to stand around and direct voters to the booths and answer any questions they had. Towards the end of the night when we were understaffed I was put on the ballot machine and put in charge of telling voters how to put their ballots in the machine and giving them the "i voted" sticker.

For most of the day though, at least 12 hours of it, I was on one of the computers taking people's IDs, scanning them and then if it wouldn't read looking up their information to see if they could vote. I was made to look like I knew what I was doing by the much more experienced blonde seated next to me, who I had to ask for help every time a spanish-only voter couldn't understand me.

Beyond that there are four specific incidents amusing enough to be worth mentioning here.

...

First was a short, middle-aged but very cocksure Hispanic voter who put a great big smile on my face.

Rules about campaigning in the polling place are extremely strict. No campaign stuff within 100 feet of the polls, you're not even supposed to have sage negateder stickers on your car if you park on site. I was going to wear a red button-up shirt, but was informed that would be enough for some voter to complain I was trying to influence their vote, so I wore grey instead.

This wonderfully smug gentleman came in wearing a MAGA hat though, and not a soul dared say anything about it to him. He whistled his way to the booths strutting like a rooster, and while technically I was supposed to tell him to remove the hat, I couldn't help but admire the balls to walk right in to what he knew was enemy territory and say "I'm a Mexican, I'm voting for Trump, and I want everyone to know."

Another thing I noticed was that the voters seemed to fall into one of two categories. The finest our city had to offer, and the absolute dregs of society. On the one end you had a lot of veterans, cops, nurses and so on. On the other end were people bussed in. Poorly dressed, apathetic to the process, possibly high, largely disinterested. The worst was this one guy, gave me pause for self-reflection. "I could have ended up this bad."

He was fat, his hair and clothes were dirty, had a gnarly neckbeard, was in a t-shirt and shorts with flip-flops and all his nails were long and filed sharp. He thought he had, but according to the computer he'd never registered. As is standard we offered him a form to register right there and the chance to vote provisionally but he just snorted and said "Why bother? I got four years to register for the next one, right?" and took off.

Beautiful

Near the end of the night an elderly woman's ballot was rejected when I was stationed on the machine. One of very few rejections that night. Most of her ballot was normal, but she'd made a mistake on the section for a local congressman. It stunned me because the Republican challenger -who I sorta met and is a really solid, good guy- was a virtual unknown, and this woman hated him enough to mark his name along with his opponent. Specificallys he put an x and the word "NO!" on his bubble, so the machine counted it as her voting for both, so she had to go back and do the whole thing over.

You're a simple man op, and that's what I like about you.