A first-person account of Election Day, from the perspective of a poll worker.

I’ve always voted by mail. I turned 18 in December of 2012, the month after Barack Obama was re-elected, and by September of 2013, I was in Santa Cruz going to college. Aside from seeing occasional “voting polls over here” signs at my elementary school, I had no idea what a polling place looked like.

So I was anxious about being a poll worker on June 5, even after a two-and-a-half-hour training session. But I knew I’d be alongside my grandma, Gertrude “Trudy” Moore, who’s been a poll worker since 2002. She’d been stationed at our precinct in East Salinas at least six times before, for both primary and general elections.

She calls working at the polls her civic duty; meeting people throughout the process is a bonus for her.

She and I were half of a four-person team, three clerks and an inspector. At 6 am on Election Day, we arrived at the Hebbron Family Center to set up signage and the electronic voting machine before the polls opened. At 7am on the dot, my grandma walked outside, loudly announcing the polls were open—to no one but the birds.

It wasn’t until after 8am that we finally had our first voter. In the meantime, we just talked among ourselves, including the story of how my grandparents first met (he was going steady with a friend of hers at the time). Our inspector’s wife delivered donuts and coffee that we snacked on throughout the day. We had enough to offer some to our field inspector, and some early bird voters.

Two members of our four-person team were bilingual in Spanish, especially useful considering well over half of our roughly 120 voters were Spanish speakers.

By the end of the day, I had learned how to ask voters to state their address, and to ask them to sign here on the voter roster, in Spanish. (Thankfully, I had enough prior knowledge to ask voters for their name and to thank them for their vote.)

Most voters came to drop off vote-by-mail ballots; only one voter chose to use the electronic machine; others opted for paper ballots.

I’d been expecting long lines all day, maybe a rush after 5pm, but no such lines ever materialized. At most, we had about five or six people at one time. People came in alone, in pairs, and in trios—couples voting together and families dropping off ballots together, trickling in throughout the day with plenty of long, voter-less breaks in between. The closest thing to any sort of rush was a young woman who left to retrieve her vote by mail ballot, returning a mere five minutes before the polls closed. We assured her that she had all the time she needed to fill it out, now that she was in the building. There were only three voters left inside, working away at their ballots, when I went outside to announce the polls were closed—a far cry from the long line of voters I had expected.

It was just a primary, my grandma reminded me. Voter turnout in a general election is usually greater than in a primary.

(As of Thursday morning, the Monterey County Elections Department reports about 34-percent turnout, with some ballots still arriving. Vote-by-mail ballots postmarked by June 5 can still be received and processed up until Friday, June 8.)

In the late afternoon, kids playing outside came in and jokingly asked if they could vote. Our inspector laughed and told them to come back in a few years—but every kid accompanying a voter also got an “I Voted” sticker. Parents who came without their kids but mentioned kids also got stickers to take home. By the end of the day, we were asking most voters if they wanted to take any extra stickers home.

By 6pm, we’d been there for 12 hours and the long day was starting to affect me. I felt foggy, and a dinner break provided a much-needed energy boost to get to 8pm when the polls closed, then to 9pm, when we finished packing up.

My grandmother plans to return to work the polls for the general election in November. I’m still undecided. With one election under my belt, I’m curious to see if it’s different—and busier—general election. Poll workers are paid $135 for the day, but it’s not the money I’d go back for. It was that I liked getting to interact with the public in a way I hadn’t before.

It’s easy to feel jaded with politics, but it was equally easy for me to feel humbled and proud all at once, after every “thank you” and smile from a grateful voter.

For more information on opportunities to be a poll worker, contact the Monterey County Elections Office at 1441 Schilling Place, Salinas. 796-1499, montereycountyelections.us.