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When polling places open at 7 a.m. in Pennsylvania tomorrow, there will be some amount of messiness. That always happens.
Here are three things I try to keep in mind:
Here are three things I try to keep in mind:
1. People start lining up before polls open. That creates a line, yes, but it’s not a line bc something is wrong. And with social distancing, the line may look particularly long. Once voting starts, it takes time to go through the line and reach equilibrium.
2. There will always be a few poll workers who oversleep, or don’t show up at all, or whatever. That obviously messes with the opening of the polling place.
And poll workers never have enough training, and this year many are new. It takes a minute to hit your stride.
And poll workers never have enough training, and this year many are new. It takes a minute to hit your stride.
3. There are also always a handful of technical problems or supply issues. A voting machine sent to the wrong precinct, a miscalibrated machine, a suddenly missing poll book, that kind of thing. It gets fixed, but maybe not until a few other polling places are helped.
Of course, we want perfection. But in Pennsylvania, 67 counties are running 67 in-person elections (and 67 mail elections) with thousands of poll workers and polling places and voting machines.
That many humans pulling off this complicated a task? Yeah, it won’t be perfect.
That many humans pulling off this complicated a task? Yeah, it won’t be perfect.
So lines and issues in the first hour or two don’t necessarily *alarm* me. (Though it’s totally worth reporting on problems, to be clear.) I start to get more concerned if later in the morning there are still long lines — waiting more than 30 minutes — or continued problems.
I will also be concerned if there are some common problems across polling places, which may suggest a systemic problem. For example, if lots of poll workers struggle with the same task, maybe they weren’t trained properly or something.
This year, of course, one thing I’m particularly interested in is the number of people who want to surrender their mail ballots and vote on the machines or use provisional ballots. That takes time and poll worker attention. Get enough people doing that and it can clog things up.
On the other hand, more than 2.5M people have already voted via mail ballot. A lot of voters aren’t going to the polls, and there also aren’t big closures like we had in the primary.
So I’m not fully sure what to expect when it comes to lines, and that’s something I’m watching.
So I’m not fully sure what to expect when it comes to lines, and that’s something I’m watching.
