Poll Clerking 2024: The Paper Jam
November 5, 2024, I once again volunteered as a poll clerk for a San Francisco election. I clerked at the same garage as 2022, and it was still swanky: building owner Jay served up espresso drinks, Italian soda, donuts, snacks.
The crew was:
- Christina (Kristina?): Poll Inspector, fearless leader
- Victoria: We clerked together in the swanky garage in 2022; she didn't bring crafting stuff this year, but brought some darned-handy office supplies.
- Max and Jack: High school students
- Me: Comic relief
I mention that Victoria returned. Another returner: Kayden, our 2022 high school student volunteer. But he wasn't clerking this year; he came to vote.
Something new happened this year: We had a paper jam.
This ballot, physically, was four big sheets of thick paper. (thin cardstock?) Voters marked their sheets with a pen, tore receipt strips off the tops, then fed the big parts of the sheets into a scanner to be counted. But but one voter botched tearing the little receipt-strips off. They had ragged edges and tore into the ballot sheets. When they fed a sheet into the scanner, things didn't go great. The scanner pulled in the sheet, made some unhappy whining noises, stopped, and displayed an error message on screen.
I was standing next to the machine when this happened. I knew what to do next: We have a little booklet that explains the machine's mysterious error codes. Error 1 means such-and-such went wrong, the fix is this; Error 2 means this-other-thingy went wrong, the fix is this; etc. So I flipped through the little booklet; it didn't have an explanation for this error message. Fortunately, Poll Inspector and fearless leader Christina knew that our San Francisco Poll Worker manuals contained a second list of error messages and remedies. This list knew about the error message we were looking at: Yep, it was a paper jam. There was a remedy: Press a button to exhort the scanner to expel the jammed sheet. Alas, pressing this button caused the machine to give forth no sheet, but instead more whining noises.
We called up the Department of Elections phone hotline to find out what to do next. A nice Dept-of-E person asked for the error message, asked us to press the expel-jammed-paper-button again, and when that didn't work told us to wait for a technician to come visit and clear the paper jam. Until the technician showed up, we were to tell voters that they could either wait for the technician, or could hand over their ballots to be stored in The Auxiliary Bin: a compartment on the side of the ballot scanner. After the technician unjammed things, one of us could feed those stored ballots into the scanner.
So I, the clerk standing next to the scanner, had the not-so-fun conversation with voters: Unfortunately, we have a paper jam. You can't feed your ballot into the scanner right now. You can wait for the technician, or I can put your ballot in The Auxiliary Bin for now and scan it when the technician has fixed things.
To me, this felt sketchy. I knew that historically, sometimes poll workers are corrupt. Maybe that clerk by the scanner is lying about the "paper jam". Maybe if you, the voter, hand over your ballot to be scanned "later," that clerk will look over your choices, frown, and "lose" your ballot. (I asked many people to hand over their ballots. I wonder how many of them grew up in places with "elections" like this?) San Francisco has safeguards against this corruption: poll workers watch each other; an audit will catch sites that hand out more ballots than get scanned; probably other safeguards, too. Nevertheless, asking voters to just hand over their ballots felt bad. And this was during the morning rush—many people wanted to scan their ballots and then head to work. Now they had to pause and make a decision.
Most voters handed over their ballots without thinking about it. Some voters peered at me, thought, and handed over their ballots. A few hung on to their ballots. I found these few ballot-hanger-on voters comforting. They were keeping things honest.
Eventually, the technician showed up. You, experienced at clearing paper jams from printers might wonder: Do they really need a specialized technician to clear a simple paper jam? But this was an election, and this technician was, basically, tampering with election equipment. Most of what he did was keeping records. He stayed on the phone with someone back at Dept of Elections office, telling them "OK, I'm going to break the security seal. I'm opening up the panel." He spent a lot of time making sure nobody (including him) was committing election crimes, very little time clearing out the paper jam itself.
Then I took on my second sketchy task: Feeding those Auxiliary Bin-stored ballots into the scanner. Anyone walking into the polling place would have seen me hunched over a stack of ballot sheets, picking them up and feeding them into the scanner. It must have looked pretty suspicious. I kind of hope that some voter called up the Dept of Elections to report my actions.
A few days later, I ambled along a local retail street, seeking a sandwich. I spotted the voter who'd torn the ballot that started the whole mess. They spotted me at the same time; looked away; seemed embarrassed. I hope they weren't too embarrassed. I hope they keep voting, maybe hope they ask for help tearing off the strips next time. Nobody was born knowing how to do it, and I don't think standard high school Civics classes cover papercraft.
