Watching Them Count the Votes

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I had a strange evening. With all the medical stuff and other blogging and financial stuff I've had to do this week, I'd forgotten to fill in and mail a ballot for voting on the city being able to raise the assessment cost for our neighborhood's maintenance expenses. Each neighborhood has its own assessment district and there are around 22 of them in our city. The ballot was supposed to be in by the end of a special hearing about the assessment at the city council meeting. Since there was no time to mail it, I decided to take it to the meeting. I was supposed to give the ballot to the city clerk, but couldn't figure out which person up front was the city clerk. Finally I asked the police chief, who was standing at the back of the room, who it was and he offered to take the ballot up for me. I gratefully accepted. Then I decided to stick around and watch the meeting until it was time to leave for a Victory Party (we hoped) for a local candidate we've been supporting a couple of blocks away. The meeting, as usual was a bit boring. They finally got to the assessment hearing, and to my great surprise, only people from one neighborhood had any comments. No one else from my neighborhood that I knew of was there. Finally the hearing was over and some consultants were supposed to go outside the meeting room and count the ballots. They invited members of the public to watch. My first thought was -- something to blog about. I was also curious as to how this would be done. So I followed the two women out of the room. I was the only one watching. I guess no one else was interested. It was pretty boring at first. They had about 500 ballots in sealed envelopes to open and count, and no letter openers. I was waiting to see the paper cuts. They finally crossed the lobby and went into the open library to see if they could borrow a letter opener, but they could only get one. At first both women stood and opened envelopes. They looked at the ballots and stacked the yes votes in one pile and the no votes in another. Finally another member of the team joined them to help. Ballots were disqualified if anything but the vote and the signature were written on the ballot, if the ballots weren't signed, if a ballot was a duplicate, or if the ballot was signed but the person hadn't voted. These ballots had been mailed to each registered property owner in the city and there was a bar code that contained the assessment number and whether the vote was yes or no beside the yes and no boxes. You can see the bar codes in the photo. When there were enough open ballots to begin counting, the person at the end with the computer would scan the bar codes. It would not accept more than one bar code for the same property owner, so that's how they could spot duplicate ballots. As the woman scanned, the votes were entered into the computer and totaled. I finally left when I knew the result for my district. My district voted not to pay the higher assessment. Have you ever participated in counting votes or acting as an observer when they were being counted? I'm glad I had the opportunity to see how the system works.