I worked the polls including early voting last year here in my county in NC. I was made a Judge (in spite of not really being trained to be one) at one of the precincts for election day because I was the ONLY Republican there (and the only white person I might add) who was working the poll in this precinct of mostly Democrats.
They must have liked me because they want me back to their precinct to work the next two elections.
I just completed a course to be a Judge this year and noted a couple of changes. Mind you we still do not have Voter ID here in NC even though it passed by a majority of votes in 2016. It has gone back and forth in court. I am still hoping that changes before next year.
They now are implementing a chain of custody form and protocol, though which we didn't have last year. This is good news and I suspect is the result of the AZ audit.
Another change is they now have a new machine for handicapped/Blind to vote on call the ExpressVote. I uses a separate ballot than the regular one but can still be scanned into the voting machine. The good news about this one is the voter can have the ballot read to them which will free up poll workers who have done this in the past if there were no family members with the voter. It also has a braille keyboard for the blind. I, myself, had to read ballots off several times last year either because the voter had some vision issues and requested it or they were illiterate.
As for the training course it was severely lacking. The video couldn't be seen easily. The material didn't match the training booklets and the gal who presented it wasn't even from our county. I am gonna still have to read both booklets we were given to understand the entire process even though I worked the polls last year. (I didn't work every station and did not handle any provisional ballots) But want to know the protocol for that.
Also, I would have preferred to have had some hands on practice with opening setting up and closing both our voting machine and the new ExpressVote machines that they didn't bring.
I know this next election is mostly for local elections. I do not live in a city or town so I have no one to vote for this election cycle unless they have some county candidates on the ballot, of course. I will be checking it out before election day and voting early since I can't vote in that precinct.
Early one stop voting here starts on October 14th and runs for 14 days. Only 2 Saturdays are included (TOO many days if you ask me).
Purely curious - did you witness any foul play? If so, did you report it?
No not really. The actual election itself is pretty much free from foul play because there are so many witnesses present during the actual process.
I was there the end of election day and got to count all the ballots at the precinct with the Other Judge (democrat) and the Chief Judge (Democrat). We counted all the provisional ballots, spoiled ballots and the regular ballots. We even counted all the unused ballots and recorded the number. We signed our names to all the totals on the print outs.
Since I was the only Republican there on election day I went with the Chief Judge to turn in ALL the ballots, the drive with all the votes on it.
After I handed in our data I had NO control of what went on with the election info after it was turned into my county's BOE. The election board itself could be the problem (and in the case of my county there were many entries that were being changed well into late Nov. and even Dec. as I discovered from another person who was tracking all of NC election board results)
Not sure who was doing it but that WAS a problem. And also from what I could see NO machines were connected to the internet while at our precinct. (Very rural county here BTW) but I didn't know for sure if they weren't for a fact. I doubt it since the precinct I worked in did not have internet there. But the main precinct in the County seat did where early voting took place.
However, all data from all the precincts in the county are submitted to the BOE by the end of election day and it is the BOE who combine the results using the drives we bring back. Who knows if anyone is manipulating that data?
It is my thought that it is those who COUNT the ballots in the end who are really in charge of which way the votes go. And I had no idea who was watching them in our County. All I know is we have more Republicans who have come forward to be on the County BOE. Last year it was mostly Dems.
It sounds like you have some really good ideas for improving the training!