What I Learned from My Experience Working in the US 2020 General Election

How much do you know about the minutia of how the United States of America runs its elections? Before I worked at the Guilford County Board of Elections, I knew about districts, gerrymandering, the electoral college, distinctions between city, county, state, and national contests, filing deadlines, and some history of how voting worked in our nation’s past. After 48 days working at my local county board of elections office leading up to, during, and after the 2020 General Election, I learned far more than I had expected.

On my first day on the job, a news crew collected footage of the service window while voters turned in registration forms and absentee envelopes.

How I Started

The US Census Bureau estimated the 2019 Guilford County population to be about 500,000 people. That makes us a medium-population county. There is a small complement of full-time staff at the Guilford County Board of Elections (BoE). These dedicated professionals serve as repositories of expertise to keep the system ready for elections. They specialize in poll worker supplies, registration, early voting, absentee voting, and equipment and personnel management.

During elections (and in particular, general elections), this dedicated staff require assistance to handle the volume of tasks required to fulfill their duties. Our county handles this in two ways:

1. They hire and train poll workers to work during early voting and election day. These individuals are known as precinct judges and precinct chief judges. They work on several specific days to handle checking voters against the books, registering voters (during early voting), and ensuring that ballots are correctly cast to be counted.
2. They hire temporary employees through a staffing agency to handle overflow administrative tasks. These tasks can include handling paperwork (physical and electronic records), sending and processing absentee envelopes, answering phone calls, and assisting voters at the service window.

I was hired on through their staffing agency as a customer service representative. I was initially expected to handle phone calls and some service window tasks. I wound up working at the service window the first three days and the phone bank up until a few days after the election, among other jobs discussed in more detail below.

What I Accomplished

Service Window

While working the service window, I received 324 absentee envelopes and 159 voter registration forms. Some people brought in more than one document, but I interacted with at least 400 voters over that time. The ebb and flow of voters throughout the day and on the last day registrations were accepted was fascinating. Lunch and closing were typically the busiest, which coincides with when people would have been available to see us in person. The first image in this article shows yellow sheets above each window. Those sheets listed all the relations of individuals who were allowed to turn in absentee envelopes. Each state handles absentee returns differently. Our state has 13 allowable family relations for hand-delivery if the voter doesn’t want to mail their ballot back.

Phones

I started working on the phones on my fourth day at the office. I found it exciting and illuminating. Every ten calls or so, there would be something new that I couldn’t answer, requiring me to transfer them to a full-time staff member or ask on their behalf. On election day, call volume peaked so much that everyone answering the phones had to answer calls immediately after ending the last call. I handled a few extra special projects, so I wasn’t on the phone the entire time. The graph below shows the volume of inbound calls I answered during my time at the BoE. Note the large volume of election-day calls and the sharp drop-off in call volume after that.

Calls received as a bar graph per day. Election Day is highlighted in red.

Data Entry

Alongside starting work on the phone bank, I also started entering data from registration forms and some other assorted documents for registration. These documents were received by mail, in person, or sent from the DMV or state board of elections. They use a customized computer program to track the forms and then enter them by hand into their database. Paper forms are then archived for a set number of years in case any errors arise. The variety and quality of handwriting in these forms is incredible. Sometimes we would receive documents that had three people in a row confused at what was written on one line (sloppy handwriting). The data has automated data validation measures and at least one human review level before being committed to the complete record. The information entered into the database then becomes public record. I personally entered 4,600 registration forms, archived 4,300 registration forms, uploaded 3,000 forms, and processed another 16,000 forms after election day.

Scanning Absentee Envelopes

On my 14th workday, one of the local political parties placed a public records request to see all the absentee envelopes that we had received. I volunteered to scan them so our director could redact private information (signatures and reference numbers) before sending that party scans of the envelopes. I started counting by estimation before finding an easy way to get an exact count, three days before finishing the scans. As a result, my numbers are likely off by a bit. By my count, Guilford county accepted about 53,000 absentee envelopes.

Other Projects

While I was assigned primarily to the registrations department, I assisted in the absentee department, helped with the early voting and poll worker supply supervisors’ tasks, and took on a few special projects for the director. One of these projects involved collecting accepted and rejected provisional ballot applications for a protest hearing and redacting information to prevent identity theft since the documents would become public record. This particular one also involved creating copies of copies for redaction, which was a fairly amusing process.

What I Learned

Knowledge

There is so much involved in the process of voting! The deadlines, laws, and procedures are incredible. There is a reason people make whole careers out of handling elections. The number of people who didn’t know their address or zip code was also baffling. E.g., “I live at 123 Example Road.” In reality, they live at 123 Ex Ample Drive. Before working at the board of elections, I was unaware of an actual board existing to decide certain items under their purview. Because of the large volume of absentee envelopes this year, a large part of their work involved deciding whether envelopes with incomplete information could be accepted, cured, or had to be rejected. Several court rulings along the way also influenced this.

Recounts

Shortly after the general election, there was a complete automated recount for a state-wide race and some local races. The losing parties in the local races requested a hand recount, which may still be ongoing. The requesting processes and time involved in recounting are extensive. I was only peripherally aware of them, but it was still interesting.

Conclusion

I learned a lot! This was a fascinating experience. I created a dashboard you can see on Tableau Public exploring some of my productivity up through November 25th (as of the time of publication). If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.

I look forward to hearing from you!