“Town Crank” — I love it! 🙂
Originally shared by Jim Gettys
Yesterday, I attended training (required this year) for poll workers in my town of Carlisle, MA. Many towns and states need more poll workers this year to support early voting; any citizen is encouraged to volunteer. I encourage everyone to volunteer for similar service: you too can be part of what makes our elections “trustable”. We expect turn out to be very heavy, and the town has enlisted extra ballot counters, so we can count the vote as quickly as feasible.
I particularly like my town’s methodology. We still use paper ballots, and nice old ballot boxes.
So we have a paper trail from beginning to end of the process. Hacking voting machines won’t affect our results.
Our boxes in Carlisle look slightly different than these, with a groove on the slot you slide your ballot paper in, and a poll worker then operates the box that takes the ballot with cranks on the side that make a cheery “ding” when a ballot is cranked into the box (incrementing a counter).
And best of all, the operator of the ballot box has the title of “Town Crank”. I aspire to this title. 🙂