Pee-wee Herman is absolutely right. It’s very likely that your local election office needs more pollworkers, and they would probably love to have some younger (as in, pre-retirement age) people doing the job, especially since the main skill required is basic computer literacy.

I was a pollworker in a bunch of elections and now I’m a pollworker-trainer/tech support guy for the election office so let me go into detail about what pollworkers do (in my county at least).

First you have to attend some training sessions. In one of them, a very handsome gentleman will explain how to hook up a computer to a printer and use some digital pollbook software. The main idea of this software is you just do whatever the text on the screen says you should do.

The other training session covers all the other stuff. I won’t spoil it for you.

On the morning of the election, you show up at your polling place at 6 AM. You and your team of retirees set up all the computers and post all the signs and turn on the ballot counting machine.

Turning on the ballot counter is a sensitive process because you have to properly document that no ballots have been counted prior to the election, but you covered all this in training, and also there’s a very detailed 11”x17” laminated sheet of instructions for you to follow.

At 7:00 AM, you open the doors to voters. This is the general election, so you might actually have people waiting outside the door at 7:00. But maybe not during a pandemic. Hmm.

Well, let’s pretend this isn’t during a pandemic, since that’s where my of my experience lies.

You quickly get into a groove of processing voters by getting their info and looking them up in the software and hooking them up with their ballot and directing them to an available voting booth. A slim minority of voters have weird stuff going on that takes extra time to handle.

Some voters will grouse about how “you” are running the election, because you’re not asking for ID or you ARE asking for ID or whatever, but here’s the cool thing: YOU DON’T CARE. YOU ARE PLENTY BUSY JUST DOING WHAT THE LAW SAYS POLLWORKERS SHOULD DO.

As a cog in the Democracy Machine, you have no opinion about what the election laws are; you just execute them as efficiently as possible! Good job!!!

If a problem arises, you can call the office and they’ll figure it out. If it’s a technological problem, they’ll send out a VERY handsome man to analyze your setup and fix the issue (the issue was “you somehow stuck a USB cable into an ethernet port”)

Anyway you keep doing your job and smiling at strangers until the polls close at 9. Then you shut down all the machines and follow the very clear instructions about how to get the results out of your ballot counter.

AND THEN YOU GO HOME

THE END