[puckerman]

I haven't voted yet, but will be in an hour or so. I guess I've been lucky. I've never waited more than ten minutes to vote. I'm 43 and have voted as long as I was eligible.

My mother was a poll worker for many years. She often worked the polls with the same women in the precinct. They never asked for an ID because they already knew everybody anyway. That was how it was when I was a child.

Now when I vote, it's almost always retirees who are working the polls. It's just old folks who want to make a little extra cash and do "their civic duty." It's actually something I hope to do myself sometime.

Before working women, poll workers were mostly housewives. Since they didn't have a traditional job, they could take a day to go to the polls. Usually my grandmother or someone else would watch me for the day. Sometimes, my father would even take the day off and go buy lunch for the ladies working the polls.

Generally, leaving the polling place (bathroom excepted) is not an option. And the day would start at around 5:30 and go till as late as 9:00 or 10:00. It truly was a full-day's work.

If you have to wait for a long time voting today, take a minute to think about the poll-worker shortage. It's an indirect consequence of working women and feminism.

[britchard]

I don't think most American women would like working for little money, even if it's for the good of their country.

[Carlos100]

I've been a poll volunteer in the US before. I declined to accept the $100 pay because my company let me do it without having to take a vacation day. As puckerman said, it's a long day. We started set-up at 0430 and I got home at 1130 that night. I was exhausted. Here's some of my observations:

- Poll volunteers are inexperienced because big elections like this only happen every two years or so. Thus, the poll station is usually a big, confused, clusterfuck in the mornings as the volunteers try to get their shit together, especially at presidential elections. I suggest voting after work on your way home rather than in the morning on your way to work. The poll station should be operating more smoothly once the volunteers get better organized as the day goes on.

- I noticed a lot of irregularities in the vote. Several times women went into the booth with their kids and her kids pushed one of the buttons before she could stop them. So, I would have to reset the machine so she could vote, but the kids' votes still counted because we didn't have the manpower or know-how to get into the machines to erase their votes. Also, the volunteers got some people confused with others with similar names when they checked in so some people voted who weren't registered for that precinct and they may have been able to vote twice in more than one precinct.

- Some really hot women came in to vote. I wasn't game aware at the time, but if I had been there would have been opportunities to do some approaches.

- The votes were counted right there at the polling station at the end of the day and then we turned in our numbers to the county registrar. The registrar did not double-check the vote counts unless a protest was lodged by one of the candidates. The problem with this is that the volunteers, most of them elderly, were utterly exhausted at the end of the day and just wanted to get the heck out of there. It's very likely that their vote counts were inaccurate to some degree.

- Some of the write-in votes were funny. I wasn't suprised to see votes for Howard Stern, Mickey Mouse, and Weird Al Yankovic, but there were more than I expected.