best practice
"best practice" is one of those corporate euphemisms upon which tv shows like "better off ted" get lots of laughs. (one of the funniest shows on tv--check it out!) no worries if you don't know exactly what i'm talking about yet, but there's actually a worthwhile premise buried somewhere deep beneath the innumerable layers of BS now heaped upon the phrase, and i was reminded of this while standing in line in my polling place to get checked out after voting this morning.
most waiting lines in polling places stack up right inside the door, (when they exist, as they should more frequently exist), as folks wait to get to the table where people's addresses are looked up in order to have their names checked off as having shown up to vote. at that point, the ballots are handed out, and observing the extensive number of booths to house people while they stand there and make up their mind for the very last time, and the fact that the check-out lookup is exactly as complicated as the check-in lookup, meaning that it should take exactly the same amount of time, there's really a pretty smooth flow from there. or, at least, there ought to be if polling place workers would follow "best practice"...
one best practice, taught to me years ago by my politically involved parents, is to draw a line through the voter's name with a ruler, so that the line extends over to the little box where the voter is to be checked off. that way, no matter how many people show up to vote in a crush, and no matter how flustered the polling volunteer worker may become, the chances of checking the wrong box and running into trouble later are minimized. oh, and the other best practice is for polling workers to be hired based on their working familiarity with alphabetical order...
so, this morning, when i emerged from the booth with my little black circle so proudly filled in, (this is not a political opinion piece, so the identity of the candidate belonging to that little circle is irrelevant, except to the fact that i VOTED, and YOU SHOULD TOO), i found myself at the back of a line that was already getting pretty extensive, and it was barely after 8am. the check-in had gone smoothly. i gave my street address, and the functionally literate poll worker had found me and checked me off... but i noticed that the practice had been slightly less than best, (no ruler, and no straight line through to the check box), and i wondered what that might mean to the management of this particular precinct's polling workforce...
the answer is that it boded very un-well...
the line to the check-out table was barely moving, and as i got closer it became painfully obvious that the older lady in the disney world sweatshirt manning (womanning?) the check-out voter book did not win that disney world sweatshirt in a spelling contest. yeah, i know, there are a lot of M streets downtown here which can create some confusion (Ma, Me, Mi?), but, geez, don't keep flipping to the back of the book once you go past the up and down zig-zaggy letters, hoping that there are more of them towards the back with the more-rounded P's. (as we proved this morning, she and i together, there aren't...) and, once the street was finally located, and my name was found, (not, by the way, by the first letter of my last one, but by the length of it), there was a frantic little scribble in the check box as the next voter was hurried to be addressed.
i can see where this is going. somewhere towards 8pm tonight, some voter getting to the front of the check-out line is going to discover that his or her name, once his or her name can be located among the seemingly-to-the-poll-worker random lists of names and streets, will already have a check in the box beside it.
how could that possibly happen?
best practice would be rulers and lines, manned (or womanned) by people with a working knowledge of the dictionary, or, at least, alphabetical order.
but who is complaining?
we all get to vote, (hopefully nobody will be turned away for having a check box improperly checked during the day today), and that's a beautiful thing.
when i get older, and i can retire from the kind of a place where a show like "better off ted" gets all its best material, i am going to take a part-time gig as a volunteer poll worker because i already know the important bits about poll "best practice". and my alphabet!
most waiting lines in polling places stack up right inside the door, (when they exist, as they should more frequently exist), as folks wait to get to the table where people's addresses are looked up in order to have their names checked off as having shown up to vote. at that point, the ballots are handed out, and observing the extensive number of booths to house people while they stand there and make up their mind for the very last time, and the fact that the check-out lookup is exactly as complicated as the check-in lookup, meaning that it should take exactly the same amount of time, there's really a pretty smooth flow from there. or, at least, there ought to be if polling place workers would follow "best practice"...
one best practice, taught to me years ago by my politically involved parents, is to draw a line through the voter's name with a ruler, so that the line extends over to the little box where the voter is to be checked off. that way, no matter how many people show up to vote in a crush, and no matter how flustered the polling volunteer worker may become, the chances of checking the wrong box and running into trouble later are minimized. oh, and the other best practice is for polling workers to be hired based on their working familiarity with alphabetical order...
so, this morning, when i emerged from the booth with my little black circle so proudly filled in, (this is not a political opinion piece, so the identity of the candidate belonging to that little circle is irrelevant, except to the fact that i VOTED, and YOU SHOULD TOO), i found myself at the back of a line that was already getting pretty extensive, and it was barely after 8am. the check-in had gone smoothly. i gave my street address, and the functionally literate poll worker had found me and checked me off... but i noticed that the practice had been slightly less than best, (no ruler, and no straight line through to the check box), and i wondered what that might mean to the management of this particular precinct's polling workforce...
the answer is that it boded very un-well...
the line to the check-out table was barely moving, and as i got closer it became painfully obvious that the older lady in the disney world sweatshirt manning (womanning?) the check-out voter book did not win that disney world sweatshirt in a spelling contest. yeah, i know, there are a lot of M streets downtown here which can create some confusion (Ma, Me, Mi?), but, geez, don't keep flipping to the back of the book once you go past the up and down zig-zaggy letters, hoping that there are more of them towards the back with the more-rounded P's. (as we proved this morning, she and i together, there aren't...) and, once the street was finally located, and my name was found, (not, by the way, by the first letter of my last one, but by the length of it), there was a frantic little scribble in the check box as the next voter was hurried to be addressed.
i can see where this is going. somewhere towards 8pm tonight, some voter getting to the front of the check-out line is going to discover that his or her name, once his or her name can be located among the seemingly-to-the-poll-worker random lists of names and streets, will already have a check in the box beside it.
how could that possibly happen?
best practice would be rulers and lines, manned (or womanned) by people with a working knowledge of the dictionary, or, at least, alphabetical order.
but who is complaining?
we all get to vote, (hopefully nobody will be turned away for having a check box improperly checked during the day today), and that's a beautiful thing.
when i get older, and i can retire from the kind of a place where a show like "better off ted" gets all its best material, i am going to take a part-time gig as a volunteer poll worker because i already know the important bits about poll "best practice". and my alphabet!
Labels: politics
posted by kad barma at 10:06 AM
1 Comments:
I laughed out loud reading this, because I just went through the same experience at the same polling station with the same lady.
The lady at the original line (where you get the ballot) was delicately pre-empting the problem by telling you before you voted what page to tell the OTHER lady your last name was on.
In case anyone's wondering if this general alphabetic knowledge (alphabecy?) is in short supply, let me say this -- on Sunday morning, I took the "census worker test" over at the Elks Club on Old Ferry Lane. Hard to believe, but a lot of the questions on the test were basic alphabet sorting (i.e. put this list of people in alphabetical order), basic math, or things like matching a group of names on the left to a group of names on the right.
That's REALLY what the questions were, no b.s. In fact, if you go to the census 2010 website, you can see a sample. Well, anyway, a passing score was 10 correct out of 28, which you could've *almost* gotten by just picking your "lucky letter" 28 times in a row.
Lo and behold, several people in the room failed. There were also a lot of scores in the low teens among the passers.
And that's not just a critique on the current state of American education, as a lot of those cellar-dweller scores came from folks long removed from anything resembling a k-12.
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