Tuesday was our primary, and I was an election judge for the very first time. Which sounds fancy and important, but most of the job involves looking up would-be voters in the big registration book and verifying eligibility, giving them ballots or directing them to the newfangled touchscreen thingy, and giving them the little "I VOTED" sticker. In other words, it's a long day of clerical work (6 am to 8 pm) for $100, which works out to...more than minimum wage, anyway.

Here in southwest Colorado we didn't have quite the high-profile race that Connecticut had, but we had a single contested race - the Democratic candidate for state representative in the 59th District. As you might expect, the turnout was light, with far more Democrats than Republicans, and quite a few unaffiliated voters filling out declaration forms at the polls so they could vote in the contested Dem race. And then there was the weird stuff.

There was the Republican who got irate about being given the Republican ballot (with no contested races) and demanded to know why he was being denied his right to vote for one of the Democratic candidates. There was the unaffiliated voter who refused to declare and then got upset when we told him he couldn't vote in the primary unless he did. There was the couple who came in, both unaffiliated, and she went Democrat and he went Republican. O-kay.

The precincts I was a judge for (we had two combined) had our polling place in the county courthouse, which turned out to be an interesting place to be because the newspaper had neglected to print the list of precincts and polling places that morning, and at least one radio station was announcing the incorrect information that people could vote either in their precinct or at the courthouse. (Early voting, which closed last Friday, was at the courthouse, in the county clerk's office.) Since we had big signs saying POLLING PLACE outside the room, all the people who mistakenly thought they could vote there came to us. We developed a system of asking people where they lived, first: if they lived in the neighborhood, we'd look them up in the precinct books which held the signature cards that needed to be filled out to receive ballots, but if their address put them in another precinct we would look them up in the big books of all voters and tell them where they needed to go to vote. (This was complicated by the fact that many of the precincts had changed polling places this year, and many people went to their old places and found nothing there, so they went to the courthouse.) If their polling place was far away and they didn't think they could get there before polls closed, we'd give them a provisional ballot, which was a total pain in the butt for all concerned. We ended up redirecting (we decided that "turning away" had the wrong connotation!) about a hundred people, slightly more than actually voted at our polling place.

This was the first year that our county had touchscreen voting machines - each polling place had one, in addition to the Accu-Vote optical scan system that we had used before. These are pretty cool machines, actually. The paper trail issue is handled by having a little printer behind a window that prints out the ballot after the voter has verified all of his or her selections on the screen, but before he or she actually casts the ballot. This way the voter can see that the recorded vote is identical to the chosen vote. The printed ballot is on a continuous strip, like a cash-register receipt, and it spools on a one-way roller into a plastic canister which is sealed (by us) at the end of the voting day and is kept with the (also sealed) paper ballots from the other machine.

Voters had a choice of which machine to use, the optical scan or the touch screen, and although we didn't keep track, we decided that the rough demographic split was that younger people and women tended to vote the touch screen. At the end of the day there were slightly more votes cast with the optical scan machine. (I used the touch screen.)

All in all, it was kind of like having a yard sale: chatting with people I knew and people I vaguely recognized from the neighborhood, exchanging paperwork, a little bit of reading in slow times, plus the do-gooder glow of knowing I was performing a civic duty. At the end of the day I signed all the ballot tallies and put the various things in the various containers and delivered them to the official counters, then went to Carver's and had a couple of pints of beer.

So, now that I've had some low-key practice, I guess I'll be doing it again for the general election.