It's 10 am and 34 People Have Voted So Far

There are 890 people listed on the register in this precinct.  Some have gotten absentee ballots and some may have voted early.  


Most of the stuff was set up last night.  We were here at 6:15am (physically here, not necessarily mentally) and had to set up of the ballot box.  We walked through the instructions starting with opening it up and checking to see it was empty in all three chambers.  One chamber is for ballots that don't work right in the main slot and in case the power goes off.  Then there's an extra one if the main chamber gets full.  You have to open the top and put the ballots into that second chamber so there is room in the main chamber. 






Then you have to slide the Accu-Vote machine into place, plug it in, then turn it on.  Next we took the cover off of the compartment that has the tape. 










  The tape automatically starts and the window is supposed to have the precinct number and have a zero.  Then it lists a bunch of zeroes - I'm assuming one for each item on the ballot. 

Then each of the poll-workers signs the tape and it gets rolled up and the cover to this compartment is locked on.  There was a little metal bar with a metal security band locked on.   The tail of the security band kept getting caught in the cover as we tried to lock that on.  Eventually we got it right. 

We all had to take an oath to uphold the laws of the US, the State of Alaska, and the Municipality of Anchorage.

We had an early voter who was here before 7am who waited until it was time to start.  Then there was a steady flow.  By 8am we had had 11 voters, one of whom was a questioned ballot. (Someone who was from another precinct.)







We had a brief scare as someone asked about the Assembly race and why that wasn’t on the ballot.  He was right.  There were just two school board races.  No Assembly race.  But we figured out that the Assembly member from this district wasn't up for reelection.  But the voter said that his wife had voted early at Loussac Library and had an Assembly race on her ballot. 

This raised a question for me - if someone votes a questioned ballot in another polling place, could they vote for a candidate that isn’t on their own ballot in their home precinct?

We checked with , reported the situation the man told us about with the election office and checked on what happens to questioned ballots with races the voter isn't eligible to vote for.  They said that questioned ballots are hand checked for precincts and if they get a ballot with races they can’t vote for, those are voided. 

We’ve got strawberries, grapes, and muffins that the other workers brought in to munch on - and for people who voted.