A long and inspiring day guiding democracy

But when you're an election judge, you can't help but be moved when several dozen people are lined up to vote a half an hour before the polls even open.

The most refreshing feature of my 15 1/2-hour stint as an election judge on Election Day was the simple eagerness of people to vote at the Martin Luther King Park building in south Minneapolis. They were so eager that 493 people registered to vote after the polls opened in my precinct. They constituted fully a quarter of people who voted in person there.

This year is the first time that the law allowed unaffiliated judges -- those who like me don't affiliate with a political party -- to serve as judges. I signed up at the invitation of city election officials.

The day of a judge runs a gamut of tasks ranging from the predawn unfolding of voting booths from suitcase-like containers to reconciling voter counts late at night when the fatigue of a long day undermines precision.

Judges need to be quick studies, problem solvers, good with people and able to count accurately to at least a hundred. They guide people to the right lines, register them, apply election laws, open and process absentee ballots and seal counted ballots for safekeeping.

I spent most of the day on registering voters -- one of the most challenging tasks because of Minnesota's multiplicity of ways to establish residency in a precinct. Those who registered on Election Day predominantly are young people, those in their most mobile stage of life.

Although Minnesota is one of the most liberal states in terms of the multiple ways in which people can prove residence in order to register on Election Day, the list isn't endless.

Determining who meets the criteria for establishing residence took at least a third of the judge time at our precinct. Even after two hours of training weeks before the election, plus poring through a sizable election manual, we kept a cheat sheet handy to parse the fine points of proving residency.

Helping somebody to find the right combination is one of the most rewarding parts of serving as a judge. The easiest method is showing a current state driver's license or ID with the current address. But people don't always update their licenses as they move, so other picture IDs can be used, often in combination with current utility bills.

Some newly arrived residents -- especially renters whose utility bills are in a roommate's name or those who pay bills online -- had trouble scrounging the required documentation. But in several such cases, neighbors or roommates already at the polls vouched for a would-be registrant's residency.

One of the saddest parts of the day was when we judges had to tell a handful of voters that they didn't meet the threshold to register. They brought no lack of evidence of residency. But under the law, insurance bills don't count. Nor do pay stubs. Or Social Security benefit statements. Some people were upset. Some got hangdog looks. But in the end, as much as they wanted to help, judges had to fall back on what we were instructed in our training -- the law is the law.

Nevertheless, roughly 1,100 people voted in person by noon and almost 1,900 by closing time. Turnout was heaviest in the morning, meaning that the anticipated evening rush never materialized. That allowed us to divert time to the time-consuming job of opening and processing absentee ballots delivered to our precinct during the day.

For overseas absentees, judges had to hand-transfer voter choices from facsimile ballots onto blank regulation ballots that could be fed into the ballot-counting machine, then cross-check one another's work.

My worst moment as a judge came when I opened a domestic absentee ballot envelope and accidentally cut a ballot in half with my letter opener. My fears of committing some sort of felony vanished when I was instructed to simply recopy the voter's choices onto a fresh blank ballot.

Judges can be paid or volunteer. Some of them have been guiding voters for decades. Most come from the ranks of political parties.

Judges are instructed to keep partisanship out of the polls, and it worked -- by the end of the day, I was clueless as to which political parties each of the roughly dozen judges with whom I worked represented.

For me, that's part of the triumph of democracy over partisanship.

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438