A visit to Multnomah County Elections

Jim Robison, chair of the Mulnomah Democrats, and I made a field trip today to the Multnomah County Elections office. Situated in a bland institutional building in a mixed use neighborhood in SE Portland, the elections offices seem like one big room upstairs without a lot of cube dividers, filled with busy administrators.

A long counter runs along the length of the building near the public doors, with signs that say things like "No cell phone use in this building" and "No public restrooms" and "Visitors must check in." A cork board is festooned with public notices, county job postings, and important dates.

Overall, the first impression is bland and impersonal bureaucracy. But the people here work with a glint in their eye this time of year. It's ballot certification time.

Last week was the election, and the counts for the more prominent elected offices have long since been announced. But there's an important ballot count still going on in the basement.

After checking in, Jim and I are ushered through a low gate in the formica curtain wall that separates the public from the election workers, navigate through a series of swinging doors, down a wide stair to the ballot dungeon.

Where the upstairs office radiate blandness, the basement -- dim, cavernous, and permeated with the awful smell of hot asphalt from street construction outside -- feels like a 40's sweatshop. Dull concrete floors are dotted with filing carts and document bins.

In one corner, about ten long folding tables are set up, perhaps four or five in use. This is where the dungeon effect falls away. In this brightly lit corner, a dozen or so grey haired women sit in groups, three or four at a table, certifying the marked-up and write-in ballots for Precinct Committee Persons.

Somehow I had expected computer scanners, cube walls, bright expensive offices, brisk young professionals consulting printouts. But this looks more like a meeting of the elder contingent of the League of Women voters, armed with number two pencils and canary tally sheets where they tick off votes next to the printed and written-in names for each precinct, shuffling manila envelopes with sheafs of ballots. I feel like I've come through a very pleasant time warp, far from the shrill controversies over Diebold's voting machines.

One by one, tick mark by tick mark, our volunteers are elected by their neighbors. Here in Portland, the precinct worker is the lowest ranking elected official of the political system. You need three votes to get certified for an uncontested seat. Each precinct might have a maximum of eight or so precinct workers, evenly divided between male and female allocated posts.

We PCPs (yes, I had a problem with the acronym too...) are the infantry of democracy. We walk our neighborhoods registering voters, urging people to vote, informing our neighbors on candidates and ballot measures. In our state, only the Democratic and Republican Parties elect precinct workers on the public ballot -- the Pacific Greens, Socialists, Libertarians, and other parties have their own less formal structures due to their smaller organizations.

In Portland, some precincts are almost inherited seats. Generations of families share the precinct dueties, sometimes multiple generations out of single households. We have some PCPs who are not terribly active, but the Party has been part of their social life their whole adult life. Since most precincts aren't filled to the maximum count, there's no real pressure on these folks. This year, due to the re-entry or new entry of folks as activists in the Democratic Party, we have more PCPs filing for office, on the ballot, than ever. But for all those folks who didn't know to enter by the filing date, we've tried to tell them all -- just write your own name in and get two registered Democrats in your neighborhood to write you in, and you're in the club!

Here in a puddle of light in this dim echoing pit, cheerful women work at each table to certify the PCP votes, and squint to decipher the write-ins. Later in the week, Jim and I will be back when all the ballots are certified to check to make sure folks who informed us that they were trying for write-ins got elected, if possible. Sometimes, knowing that a person is running lets us help to decipher an otherwise barely legible vote.

If the person isn't voted in, they can't vote at our annual organizational meeting on the first of July when we elect officers for the year. But all year, people come to us and are appointed as PCPs for the remainder of the year at our monthly meetings, generally at the Hollywood Senior Center. These monthly gatherums are archaically designated as the "Central Committee Meeting" -- a phrase that evokes, to me, an image of some soviet-era smoke-filled room with six fat old men with a bottle of vodka, but is actually just our general monthly meeting replete with chat and munchies.

Next week, we'll be contacting our new and old PCPs to make sure they get their confirmations into elections before the annual meeting -- but today, we're observing. It's in this featureless basement that the volunteers and the professionals of the machinery of democracy meet, observe process, and smile at each other in the pool of light surrounded by darkness. Everyone here feels like they are helping to make things work better.