I randomly encountered Jeffrey Oldham in the park today. I was surprised to see him since it wasn't election day. We know each other from work, but in recent years we've met on election day. Jeffrey's sweetie volunteered as a poll worker; Jeffrey supported her efforts by biking around to nearby polling sites and running errands for poll workers.

But but Jeffrey's sweetie isn't working the upcoming election. Why not? Because in San Francisco, working a poll is a long shift, 14 hours minimum.

I sympathized. The shift length was my reason for drawing the line at working at most one election per year. It's like volunteering for two days, since I'm still pretty wiped out the day after. When the SF D. of E. announced that we'd have four elections this year, I knew I didn't want to work them all.

Jeffrey's sweetie had independently reached the same conclusion I had: the SF Department of Elections would get more volunteering out of us overall if we could work a shorter shift each election. If I could work from the 6AM set-up until afternoon and then go home, that would be lovely; I could do that a few times a year. If I could work from afternoon until the night-time clean-up, that would be similarly lovely.

I dunno what fraction of potential poll workers have a similar per-day work-amount threshold, though. All I know now is that it's "at least two".

Jeffrey said another SF bay area county (Santa Clara County, maybe? I forget exactly what he said) does ask for some volunteers to work short shifts, but those sound tiring too: they're late-night shifts at the local D. of E. on election night. Maybe if I was a night owl, those would appeal.