This is not my final draft, but this is a start.
Dear Lakeville City Clerk,
After serving as an election judge on Nov 2 at precinct #8, and I would just like to give you a bit of review on how it went. Glenn did a good job as head judge. I worked the 2nd shift. Apparently we had a 'no show' judge. I was put on the new voter registration table, by myself. I must tell you, I was sitting at that table from 1:45 until 8pm straight, without any breaks. It was BUSY! A couple of times Glenn was able to come over and help me, but we had no floaters. He was very busy too. We registered 250 new voters at precinct 8. Ideally, there would have been three people working at that table during the busiest times, and two people at that table all day. I asked Glenn to call for help. No one came to help. I'm a fairly calm and competent person and have some experience in customer service, but I must say, that this was a very stressful job! I wasn't even able to take one break. There were a couple points in the afternoon that I was able to stand up and stretch for about a minute, but then more people came in and it was back to work.
As far as the registration process goes, I have some suggestions for improvement. Having 13 lines per page on the roster book makes it rather clumsy for counting. 10 or 15 per page would be nice. We were off by 1 so we had to count things many times. It also would be nice to have two roster books at the table. Passing one book around made things rather clumsy and disorderly. I can't understand why they have to fill out a roster, when they just filled all of that information out on the registration form -- duplicate information. I would rather go over one form, carefully and slowly and smooth out the process. As a result of the busyness of that station and working by myself, I know that I made errors--missing information, and I feel really bad about that. It was definitely operator error. Hopefully the mistakes can be counted on one hand.
I think that more time should be spent in the training sessions on voter registration. It is a rather complicated process. Maybe each person should have to do a mock registration to practice. There are a lot of details to cover and it can be confusing. Especially when you are swamped! Registration seems like the place where the most inconsistencies and errors could occur.
For what it's worth, that precinct has the most confusing configuration. Cities of Farmington & Lakeville, school districts of Apple Valley & Farmington, all mixed together. It's really unfortunate that the boundary lines are drawn how they are. It was very burdensome and cumbersome to have to look up every single person's school district. It really bogged down the process.
So after all that, I would say my biggest suggestion would be to have more judges working - for sure have two people to act as floaters. Then some rotation could happen and the process would be smoother for the voters and less stressful for the workers. We were definitely short-handed. Two years from now, polls are most likely going to be really busy! I hope you have many more election judges working in 2012.
I think the city should put more effort in recruiting election judges: ads in the paper, post cards/email to past election judges encouraging them to recruit friends & neighbors, more prominence on the City of Lakeville website, etc. Also, I think more effort should be made by the City and by the State of MN to encourage people to register EARLY.
This year was only my second time serving as an election judge and my first experience at the voter registration table. I am very happy to be of service in this position and hope to work again. Thanks for your attention.
Sincerely,
Andrea Munson
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