I volunteered to be a poll worker in the Santa Maria area for the presidential election of 2020. I was assigned to work at Orcutt Junior High School; here is what I learned.
On the first day of a four-day work assignment, at around 8:30 a.m., about 16 to 20 volunteer poll workers (the number of volunteers varied throughout the day), gathered around our two designated supervisors who provided us our four-day assignments. The poll-worker team at my location was a healthy cross section of the community. We had folks from all ages. We had a number of very young Latino youth—including a super bright 16-year-old Chicana—lots of retired seniors, like me, and more women than men.
To a person each poll worker carried out their duties with a solemnity and purpose that was genuine and heartfelt. We all took our assignments very seriously, but we had a great time serving our community. Our core mission was to make sure that we made every effort possible to assure that each and every one of the voters who came to the polls was treated with respect and dignity and exercised their right to vote.
At the end of the grueling four-day poll work assignment, I am proud to report that I believe we were able to accomplish this goal. No one who was registered properly to vote and wanted to vote was denied. By the end of the fourth day, we had coalesced as a proud American family that had done our volunteer work in the service of our community and nation.
I was assigned to be a bilingual greeter (along with four to six other greeters), working up front to meet the incoming voters as they walked into their local precinct to vote in person or drop off their ballots. We directed them to the appropriate stations and tried to answer questions or concerns about the voting process. When we were in doubt, we would summon a supervisor to assist the voters. While I do not know the official count of registered voters that we had the honor of serving, I believed we worked with more than 500 voters.
The vast majority of the voters at our precinct were white, with only a handful of Latino and Black voters in the mix. This approximate number of 500 voters is important because what I saw and felt as a “front-line” greeter was the almost universal angst that the voters exhibited as they came in to cast their ballot. This was no ordinary election, and the registered voters wanted to make sure that her/his vote was going to be officially counted, and not somehow or in some way discarded, lost, or otherwise ignored.
This voter concern of some nefarious or illegal action that would nullify their vote was voiced with angst and concern throughout the course of the four days. We had a few angry voters—they were all were treated with the utmost respect, and they all voted.
The incessant and vitriolic disinformation political campaigning wars that have been leveled on the American voter in this election had been insidiously effective. Many of our voters were spooked, concerned, and at times angry. I made every sincere effort to assure every voter that their sacred vote would be counted.
One important and lasting impression that I got when the final voting day was completed was that every single voter who we greeted and who subsequently cast their vote did so with the utmost reverence and respect for the voting process. No one took their solemn privilege as an American and a registered voter lightly—their own act of voting, more than anything else, legitimized the process in their hearts and minds.
I volunteered to be a poll worker in this 2020 presidential election because like so many other Americans, from every possible political stripe or affiliation, I had the real sense that the very survival of our republic was in peril. I wanted to do my small part to make sure that every registered voter—including our immigrants, minorities, youth, and first-time voters who exercised their solemn privilege to vote—felt safe and welcomed in our local electoral process.
Poll work at the local voting precinct is as grassroots-level as you get in the American electoral process. It is by no means rocket science, but it is a majestic and transparent, very hands-on, manually intensive process, and I would recommend it to anyone who has any concerns or doubts about ballots being mishandled, lost, or discarded.
The effectiveness, purity, and sheer beauty of the American voting process at the local polling location is that from start to finish, it is conducted and controlled by a team of trained and well supervised local volunteers (like me and you) who are stepping up to do their small part for our democracy. God help the man or woman who comes into the sacred poll location with ill intent or a personal agenda in mind; he/she would be quickly identified, be called out, and respectfully thrown out immediately.
At the end of the final night of poll work, I walked out to my car with a big smile on my face, with the satisfaction of knowing that I had just participated in a very important and sacred part of our American electoral process.
No matter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, I know now more than ever after my work as a poll worker that our nation will be fine—as long as patriots like my poll-worker family continue to step up to preform the unglamorous, yet very vital, work of participating in any of the many jobs and duties that are required of all of us to maintain this nation a vibrant democracy, and free from those evil forces that would like to tear it down.
With American patriots like I worked with this presidential election cycle, this nation is in great hands.
Armando Vazquez wrote to the Sun from Orcutt. Send your thoughts, comments, and opinionated letters to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2020.
