Episode 36: Transcript

"I wanted to defend the votes of my neighbors."

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: People have no idea what being a poll worker is like. None. Being a poll worker in Michigan is really not substantially different from being a poll worker anywhere. You know, just talking about the fact that you get training. You're not breaking up fights. You're literally just like pushing paper through a machine and being nice to people.

Doug French: Right. I love that.

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Doug: So you wanted to talk about elections today?

Magda: I did. I think it's important to talk about becoming more politically active as you go into your 50s because I think that this is something that a lot of people are doing or feeling guilty about not doing, not knowing how to start, all that kind of stuff. It's a natural time to become more politically active because you have come out of this phase of sort of like heavy production at work in your 30s and 40s and maybe you're feeling happy about your career and maybe aren't if you have kids they're probably not little anymore and so you have more time and energy you've also lived long enough that you are like really angry about what's going on politically. Everybody I know is a lot more upset about stuff now than they were 20 years ago and people are looking for ways to engage in the process.

Doug: I mean, are we going to come at it from anger right away?

Magda: I don't want to come at it from anger. I want to come at it from effectiveness. How can you figure out what you can do that is going to be effective in whatever your goal is and is not going to be a waste of energy and is going to soothe your anxiety?

Doug: Well, it's a quest for agency, isn't it? Especially given our divided isolated times. I mean, why do people post to Threads? They just want someone to hear them hear what they have to say.

I mean, that's what it is, and I think there's this kind of mythology that people our age are just doing nothing but you know posting angrily. I think there are a lot of people that are doing a lot more than just posting and I also think there's posting that does more than other kinds of posting.

Doug: I think it's great to talk about elections now that we're about to have our last one so this will be in the archives of how elections used to work kids if you're listening to this far into the future I'm happy that this recording will exist as as comprehensive a look as what it used to be like.

And I mean we could avoid all of these problems if we would all just commit to finding five people in our local area under the age of 30 who were not registered to vote but who could be convinced to register to vote and also to go vote, because if we made this a numbers game, if we just put a lot more people voting against Trump and the new Republicans we wouldn't be in any kind of jam at all.

Doug: I thought Taylor Swift was responsible for that.

That's fine. If Taylor Swift wants to be responsible for it, I am very very happy for her to be responsible for it. And I think all of the rest of us need to do it, too, like find people who are younger than you are–and the reason I'm saying that is because people tend to vote in higher numbers as they get older–but if we can all find people who are younger now who were not planning on voting, didn't know how to vote, don't know how to register, and just help guide them into the voting process we're going to have the numbers in there. And I think when you're talking to younger people it's really important to remember that if they haven't done it before, they maybe didn't see their parents doing it, either. And so you really have to go step by step with them. Gen Z, at least, and I think younger millennials are used to being able to sign up for anything online at the last minute, and you can't do that for registering to vote everywhere. You have to go in person, there are deadlines, so they need to be told that and helped through that.

Doug: So where do you think your efforts would be best used, though? Are you going to come here and recognize that Michigan is much more swingy and purple than Massachusetts is?

Yeah, and also I'm gonna be in Michigan working the polls, which I think is the primary topic, right? I've got a couple people in my sights here in Massachusetts that I'm gonna help register to vote and help make sure that they get to the polls, whether it's absentee or on the day, and I think I'm gonna find some people in Michigan, also.

Doug: Well, it's a perfect time for a civics lesson, one, because you are gonna be here next week working the primary on Tuesday.

Magda: Yeah, when people hear this it'll be yesterday that I was working the polls.

Doug: And we're recording on George Washington's birthday…

Magda: I didn't know that! Do you know what the mascot of George Washington was?

Doug: The Colonials.

Magda: Go Colonials!

Doug: So let's all just take solace in the fact that the father of our country was a Pisces. And you're a Pisces, so what do you think the best qualities of Pisceses are to lead a country?

That we appear porous but are actually incredibly stubborn You appear porous.

Doug: I mean, I'm down with the stubborn part,

I appear porous, I think. I think a lot of Pisces appear porous.

Doug: Well, that's part of the joy of taking advantage of that. Coming across as more porous than you are and suckering people into following you.

Well, yeah, it's a lot like the fact that I look like I look and yet I speak Spanish, especially when we lived in New York City. I would be places where people were speaking Spanish and they wouldn't know I speak it. I would say the average Pisces manipulates without trying and without ill intent. There are only some of us like me that have ill intent.

Doug: The “evil genius but for good.”

Magda: Exactly.

Doug: But at the same time, when you lived here you worked the polls, and you're about to come out for the primary, so I think the objective among other things is to talk about what that experience is like, how you get involved in it, and kind of the nuts and bolts of why voting is secure and just kind of give people a very intimate look at what it's like to be in charge of a polling place.

Before we start talking about the polling place, I want to say that I think people who decide that they want to get really politically active or even just sort of moderately politically active or even just a little politically active need to look around and see where the biggest need in their local community is. A lot of places have local races that are taking place that dictate a lot of stuff like here in this small, small town in Massachusetts, there's a race for school board that's going to dictate a lot of stuff that happens in the local schools. People are really upset about it. And so there are a lot of people who've gotten active about the school board election who had never been active before. So I would say look around locally and see what the need is. And if there's no need, like if things are going the way that you think they should be going for your local races, look at your bigger races.

In Detroit, I didn't feel like I needed to be doing as much advocacy for individual candidates. There were a couple that I worked for that I really believed in. To me, the biggest need in the city of Detroit is poll workers and the way that I made my way to being a poll worker, which I need to state out front is a paid position in Detroit. I don't know if it's paid everywhere. It should be paid everywhere. You're an actual employee of the Board of Elections, right? You can't control volunteers the way you can control paid workers, and we have to follow regulations and all that kind of stuff. So when I initially signed up, I didn't realize that it was a paid position, but it is a paid position. So back in 2016, the state of Michigan went to Donald Trump by 11,000 votes.

Doug: Oh, do we have to relive that?

Magda: Well, this is my evil origin story of why I'm a poll worker.

Doug: You should explain why that minuscule margin was so frustrating and terrible well on the day of the election.

Magda: were multiple reports from multiple City of Detroit poll locations that there was interference polls running out of ballots which it's a policy to give four or five times as many ballots as they predict they'll need. So very unusual that they would run out of ballots anywhere, let alone multiple precincts. There were lines and people were not being allowed into the poll location. All kinds of really egregious stuff that prevented a lot of Detroiters from voting. Detroit is a Black city. Detroit is very heavily a union city. Detroit is very heavily a Democratic-leaning city. I think the city tends to vote something like 92 or 94 percent Democrat. And so there were a lot of people who were prevented from voting. And I did the calculations and the numbers of precincts in Detroit. All you would have to do is prevent 23 people from each precinct from voting, and that would be the 11,000 that Trump won by. So when I moved into Detroit, I realized that I didn't have to get heavily involved in the races because, you know, I could get deeply into the local stuff or I could say, do I want to defend the votes of my neighbors and make sure that every Detroit voter who was registered was able to actually cast their vote? And that's what I decided to do, so I saw an ad or I just contacted the Board of Elections and said hey I would like to be a poll worker there are some minimum standards that you have to pass. In Detroit, if you are over the age of 18 you have to be registered to vote in Michigan to be a poll worker. And you can work as a poll worker if you're 16 and over. You basically just had to be a person who was going to welcome people to your precinct and be able to follow procedures. So there are a number of different positions in the voting. Michigan has the kind of voting where you get a paper ballot and then you use a pen or felt tip pen to bubble in the little bubble next to your candidate's name or your issues, yes or no. And then the ballot gets fed into a tabulator–the infamous tabulator, the Dominion tabulator–and the ballot comes down to the bottom of the machine and all the votes get tabulated, and if the bubble is filled in incorrectly it just says “Error” and spits the ballot at you. And then the voter can go fix the bubbles until it goes through. It's a paper-based voting system which means they have a very specific set of checks and balances on how everything goes, so the voter comes in, finds their precinct, and if they don't know what their precinct is they just walk up to any table and have them look it up. You tell your name, they find you in the registry (it's called the electronic poll book), and so the electronic poll book inspector, the EPI, looks you up in the book, makes sure that you're at that precinct (if you're not at that precinct they'll tell you which precinct to go to instead) and then the ballot inspector sitting next to them assigns them a ballot that has a number. So the EPI puts in the ballot number that the person is given and then the person takes the ballot. So the computer is recording when a voter comes in, and which ballot they are given. The computer also has information on everybody who has submitted an absentee ballot up to the night before the election, and so if somebody walks in and they've already submitted an absentee ballot, we just say hey your vote's already been recorded you can't vote twice.

Doug: Before we go any further with this–I mean this is all great and I want to get to it all before we get into the weeds of what the actual voting process is, because I think we've most of us who listen to this podcast have voted before–it's just a question of knowing what you know as a poll worker, in terms of how you're trained to interact with voters who don't know what they're doing, kind of the inside baseball what it's like to be in a polling place in Detroit or wherever and I think actually the best place to start is how you volunteered, whom you initially approached to be a poll worker, and how you trained to do it.

Magda: I saw an ad for it and I just sent it an email and signed up.

Doug: It was an ad? Is that it, really?

I think it was an ad. I don't know. It was an ad or somebody saying, hey, we're looking for poll workers or something like that.

Doug: Was it like an “ad” ad, like a print ad? Or was it on Facebook or what?

I don't remember. This was years ago. What I do know is that, every once in a while, there's a huge surge of interest in volunteering–people think it's volunteering to work the polls because you're going to defend democracy–and they think that there's more need in poorer areas to be poll workers because I guess socioeconomic status or something like that. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of correlation, to me, of where poll workers are more or less needed. There are some places where they just can’t find people to sit behind a desk for certain amounts of time. I think it's more about how the shifts are structured. In Detroit you have to come in at either 5am or 5:40am, and you’re there until 9pm.

Doug: So it’s a real carbo-load experience.

Magda:  I mean, you do get breaks. You can leave and go get lunch.

Doug: Well, that's a relief.

Magda: So you're chained there to the desk.

Doug: You're not filibustering in the Senate.

Magda: Yeah, you have to have the entire day free. And there are some places in the country that you can work morning or afternoon and evening, that kind of thing. So it's really, I think the need is determined by how they structure the process. And I also think that the need is determined by how contentious the races around them are. Detroit is such a heavily Democratic area, and I don't think as many people are volunteering for the individual campaigns and so some of those people are working as poll workers.

Doug: Given the demands of being a poll worker in terms of how much time you have to have free and it's not a passive 15 hours either there's a lot going on and a lot to do at the very end so what kind of demographic did you see when you went to train for this?

Oh, well, in Detroit, I mean, it's all Black women over the age of 40, but that's who runs Detroit anyway, right? Black women are defending democracy across the entire country, and they are absolutely making elections run in the city. That made it a lot easier for me to step into the job because Black women, you know, at the trainings who just told us exactly what to do. And then I got to my precinct, and I am usually the only white person working unless one of our kids is paired up with me at our precinct instead of at a different precinct but they know exactly what they're doing and have gotten very good at it. There are some flaws and some deliberate lack of strictness in the arranging of some of the activities of the Board of Elections and I think that a lot of that has happened because they know that these women who are running the polls are going to take care of things so they don't have to put the money or time into making things as foolproof as they would have to.

Doug: Right, so let's just revisit the timeline here. So Trump wins Michigan, even though a bunch of people left the president space blank and Jill Stein took a bunch of votes, and Wow, we were all just kind of reeling after that. It's bad enough we lose an electoral vote every census, but we're also phoning it in, or making unforced errors to the point where we really were a big part of that in 2016.

Magda: The first election I worked was on March 10th, 2020. I bought a house in Detroit and moved in in 2017. So in 2018, I was just kind of in a daze. And then at some point in 2019, I was like, okay, let me get this together.

Doug: Right, so you worked 2020 and 2022, and you're gonna work 24.

Magda: There was one in 2021 that I worked also, but it was just, I don't think it was a primary and a general at all, I think it was just one election.

Doug: For the dog catcher, yeah.

Yeah, so in 2019, however I got into it, somebody may have asked me if I wanted to do it, there was an ad, something, I don't remember what it was. But I got hooked up with the people, they ask you, like, you know, “do you have your own transportation?” “Are you willing to work someplace farther away from you in the city?” Detroit has a pretty big footprint relative to the population, so you could end up driving pretty far.

Doug: Oh yeah, if you ever paid attention to how much people wanted to shrink Detroit down and condense it during its bankruptcy.

Yeah, so then I just got assigned a precinct I think I had to go to one training and I was assigned the job of EPI. The electronic poll book is a laptop that has the role of everyone who is registered to vote in the city of Detroit. You get the one for your precinct, there's only one per precinct, and you're the one who's in charge of tracking which voters are coming in on the day and that also holds the information about which ballot you've assigned them. So there's nothing actually about the votes in the electronic poll book. All it says is that these were the people who were given a ballot that put a ballot through the tabulator.

Doug: And was there ever a situation where something even appeared remotely fishy as far as someone's name, someone's ID didn't match the reference point in the EP?

Oh yeah, occasionally stuff will happen. Like, sometimes people will move out of their voting precinct and forget to update their voter registration. Fortunately, in the city of Detroit, people don't tend to move very far. I have never seen anything that was genuinely fishy. I've seen logistical errors. I've seen... Here's one that we get a lot. A woman gets married and it's very common in a specific age demographic in Detroit for women to have hyphenated their last names, but sometimes they'll be in the voter registry with an unhyphenated last name, and the search function on this database is kind of dumb. You can only put in certain search words, and it only searched certain ways, and so I was getting these women who would show up without their voter registration card. If they have their voter registration card, I can look it up the way it's in the registry, they would just have their ID, their driver's license, and their driver's license would have the hyphen in it. But then I would spend all this time looking for them and trying to search by first name, but you know like there's 100,000 people in this registry, and then it would turn out that they were just registered without the hyphen. It's just that the search function doesn't account for that there are quirks of the system. But because there are so many checks and balances, they go fill out the ballot and then they feed it into the tabulator themselves. We can if they say “no, I'd rather have you do it.” We're just not allowed to look at it. They feed the ballot in themselves and then we give them a sticker and say, you know, “we'll see you in September, or whenever.” The energy and effort it would take to have somebody be a fake voter and not get caught in some part of that process would cost way too much money to make it reasonable for anybody to be doing that in the city of Detroit.

Doug: Yeah, it's much easier and more cost effective just to brainwash them into voting Republican.

Magda: I was working one time with one of our kids, and you know our kids are diabolical like I am, so we're just always trying to think of ways to game the system and crack the system. So we were just sort of speculating, like ,how could you do this? How much would it cost? And what we came up with was that there wasn't any way to make it valuable in a city the size of Detroit. If you had a small town, and the race for mayor came down to two votes, then Yes, maybe, it would be worth it to have two or three fraudulent voters so that you could skew the race that way. But there are just too many people in Detroit to make it make sense at all. What we did figure out was if you had money to put into it, it would actually be more efficient to just buy the entire crew working at a precinct, because then they could just go change all the votes.

Doug: Okay, so this is already turned into a primer for undermining democracy.

But I mean, my point is, the only way to do it would be to buy the entire crew. And in the city of Detroit, if you get more than, I would say, 15% of votes for any Republican candidate, nobody's going to believe it.

Doug: What I'm interested to learn more about, from your perspective, is not only what a day is like in terms of when the busiest points are when people come in to vote–probably before work and after work–but trends in general, in terms of what you've seen from your first election in 2020 to the most recent one in ‘22, and maybe what you might expect for ’24, because you're gonna be in charge of some place in 24, right?

Yeah, I'm a chairperson now. I got tapped to be a chairperson at the General in 2022 because a chairperson of a precinct had come down with COVID three days before the election. It's a small area, and so if you're trained as EPI, you're sitting right next to the ballot inspector so you know after one election you've learned the ballot inspector's job. And the chairperson is there the whole time too, so you really know what the chairperson is doing.

Doug: So there was no subsequent training involved? You just step right into it more in terms of just convenience?

It was three days before the election that I got tapped to do it

Doug: And did you feel ready?

Yeah! I did you know what this was the primary last year, or in 2022, it wasn't the general because I did get all of the training that I was supposed to go through before the general. I almost made one mistake but caught myself, but the rest the rest I did fine. 

Doug: I remember we talked about it, yeah.

Magda: So, the chairperson's big job is opening the precinct in the morning, making sure that the tabulator is all set, and you print off the correct number of null tapes and you know all that kind of stuff and then you sign everybody else in you get everybody to fill out the payroll paperwork you take their temperature because of COVID, you have to make sure everything's arranged in the right order on all the tables and everything. Then you just make sure everything's going okay, and then at the end of the night when the polls close at 8 p.m, that's your time to shine because they're like, I think, nine different envelopes that all need different sets of paperwork including things you've printed off the tabulator, and all kinds of stuff. And you gotta sign these seals, and put them across and there's a transfer case with a metal seal that goes on it, and it's all very official, and very, very attractive to the type of officious girl that may have run a bank in her parents' playroom when she was four.

You know everything's in triple kick during that locking up thing and then you take all that the chairperson and the EPI takes all that stuff to a central receiving center. There are a number of them around the city the one that I go to is in the Pistons training arena, and you just stand there and wait your turn and then they have all these people who pull apart everything that you brought in and tabulate it and if it all totals up then they tell you you got a perfect precinct and everybody cheers and it's like you know it's like being in Glen Gary Glen Ross when they ring the bell.

Doug: I don't recall you saying there was all that much of a surprise to your first gig in the big chair, right? I mean, whenever you try something in authority for the first time, there's a bit of nervousness there. You might have an idea of what's going to happen, but you're not sure now that you're in charge of how to adjudicate it so was there any big revelation during that first big kahuna run?

The only thing I think that is sort of up in the air at all is who's going to work with you, because I don't get to pick who works under me as chairperson. So they just assign somebody to work with me, and they've been assigning our son as the ballot inspector and then I just looked into this great EPI the first time, then she was back the second time, and I'm hoping that she's back again … yesterday with me. She's fantastic. She's an x-ray tech who takes the day off to work these elections because she finds them fun, and then has to be at work the next morning at 6 a.m.

Doug: having stayed till 10.

She's a very methodical person, doesn't let people flap her. I think if we were in a precinct that was really like sort of contentious, things would be different. But we just get people coming in who want to vote because it's their civic duty. Sometimes there's something that people are very adamant about voting for. Like in 2022, we had an issue on the ballot in Michigan that was codifying abortion rights. There were a lot of people who came in with very passionate feelings about that. As poll workers, we are not allowed to instigate conversation with anybody about anyone that they're voting for, any candidates any issues But i had a lot of people who just walked in and said to me “I cannot let somebody else make the decision about my body, my granddaughter's body, you know, stuff like that a lot of people were very determined to vote this in. That's kind of fun. The other thing that was really fun–OK, in March 2020, it was a presidential primary. So in Michigan, on election years, we have a presidential primary at the end of February, beginning of March. That's just the two parties and their primary for presidential candidates. Then we have a regular primary with everything else that's on the ballot in August. And then we have the general the same day as everybody else does in November. The first one I worked was the presidential primary where everybody knew Trump was going to be on the Republican ballot, but I have hardly any Republicans anywhere that I've worked. Then it was Bernie and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren was still on the ballot.

One guy walked in and wanted to vote for “Benny Sanderson.” You know, sometimes they tell you, I came to vote for so-and-so. I'm like, “I cannot talk to you about it. Here's the ballot.”

Doug: You have to go 100 yards that direction, and we can talk about it.

Exactly.

Doug: Do you have to enforce anything like in terms of ballot rules? People have been told to be more vigilant because they're trying to steal the election. So does that put you guys on tenterhooks a bit more?

I'm just in charge of my precinct inside the gym of wherever it is, the gym or the utility room or whatever it is.bThere is a PSA who is in, and I don't know a PSA, Poll Site Administrator, something like that, who's in charge of the entire building. And she, it's usually a she, is in charge of making sure that the lobbyists, whatever, the people who are working for the individual candidates stay a specific distance away from the entrances and aren't interfering with anything. To be perfectly honest, in Detroit, none of these really adversarial Republican candidates are wasting their energy sending anyone to our Detroit polls.

Doug: Although they might this year, because that's the consensus now, right? They're saying that the margin, based upon polls we've seen, is shrinking a bit, and the real bastion of Democratic support is in the city, so they're going to converge to make sure this city is on the up-and-up because that's where the most voters are. So therefore, statistically, that's most likely where the shenanigans are going to be.

Good luck to them wasting their volunteers standing outside and having voters walking by insulting them on their way in and voting Democrat.

Doug: Do you see a bunch of that? Has it gotten uglier out inside of the polling place?

No, because there are no Republicans there ever, right? In Detroit, the big election is the primary, because it's so Democratic that there might be five people running for the Democratic slot to run in the general. So that's where the war is fought, right in the primary, and sometimes things get a little contentious.

Doug: Is that why so many mayors have been trotted off with corruption charges?

I actually think it is. I think it's because a lot of Detroiters just give people the benefit of the doubt. It makes it a pleasant place to live, but not the place that's vetting mayors as well as they should be.

Doug: Well, New York is a really unpleasant place to live and they're not vetting mayors either.

I agree.

Doug: Speaking of that, it seems as though since you're coming at this from a Detroit perspective, and I voted in Ann Arbor, which is also deep deep blue, you're not gonna find that level of animosity no at a polling place at either of our places. But I think if someone like Helen Jane, whom we just talked to and who lives in a very red area, it must be much more of a chore. Especially if people on on the red side of the ledger tend to be a bit more vocal, maybe a bit more aggressive…

So part of our training as poll workers is how to recognize and interact with poll watchers. I can't remember all the names. There are three different kinds of people who can come and watch the polls. Watchers, challengers, and I don't remember the other one, but one is like a lot of times these like pro-democracy groups will just send people out kind of to just make sure that everything's going okay. They have no dog in the hunt. They just kind of want to see what it's like. And so when they introduce themselves to me, they're always these fresh-faced people who are like, “surely things are bad in the backwaters of Detroit.” I'll be like, “Oh, yeah. We had such-and-such percentage turnout last year, they always are running about 5% ahead of votes from our precinct during the day,” and all this stuff. And you know when it becomes apparent that we know what we're doing, they always have this moment of “Wow. Should I stay or should I go?Like, I'm kind of having fun here, but there's nothing to see here we haven't gotten challengers because, again, the challengers aren't spending their time at a place where A) they're afraid to go and B) I think they know in their hearts of hearts that there's no fraud happening.

Doug: Well I think most of them are aware of the scam but there are a few who will show up at, you know, the pizza place in D.C. thinking there's a pornography ring in the basement.

But I mean, you know, to me, it's like if this one polling location has had people voting 97% for the Democratic presidential candidate for the last 200 years, right? Or, you know, whatever it was, they switched parties at some point. So that probably wasn't it. But for the last 60 years, let's say for the last 60 years, and magically no one votes for Trump at that precinct. Is that fraud? That's clearly not fraud. You can look at the numbers.

Doug: You were talking about your training, though. This is actually something that most people don't know about, I would think, who haven't trained yet or maybe don't want to get involved because they're too concerned that it's getting more contentious and you might not be prepared to react or act in a way that could calm it down. I mean, you have to be told at some point that things could get ugly. How are you trained to react to that?

Well, you're trained not to get into any fights with anybody. And one of the things we're told is that if anybody did come there wanting to start a fight, they would be trying to tape you, record you or video you. So just be mindful of that. It's also not legal to come into a polling location and do video. If you watch the news on Election Day, they're not inside. If they are, they're taking b-roll before the polls open. Like, they're coming in while people are setting up the tables. It's also not legal to take a selfie of yourself holding a filled out ballot, which I think is interesting. You are allowed to bring your phone into the voting booth, which I think is good because a lot of times, you know, like in Detroit judges are a big thing. And there's one cycle, and I think it's the presidential cycle, where there are like six or seven different kinds of municipal judge races and there will be like you know vote for the top 12 and so there will be like 14 people running and to figure out which 12 you're going to pick. So sometimes you do need to cheat sheet when you're going into the poll. I was joking that for the 2020 general, people needed to pack a lunch because the ballot was so long. It had all these judges. It had the presidential election. It had senators and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And then that was also the election that we had the legalization of cannabis on. And then we also had the anti like undo the gerrymandering on. And so those were both really, really important, and both of them went through. I got a lot of new voters for that one, also, and in the primary I had people coming in and saying “can I vote Donald Trump out today?” I was like “no, sorry, you can vote for these other races come back in November.” And then in November we had just a huge, huge, huge number of new voters who had just registered. We had 19-year-old twins come in, and that was really cute. They came in with their mom. People who came in who had never voted before. We were thrilled to show them the whole process! They were looking at the ballot like, “Whoa, there's a lot of races here!” And I said, “okay, you are allowed to vote for as many or as few as you want to. You could, in theory, put an entirely blank ballot through the thing and it would be fine. But I would suggest, if you have no idea what a race or issue is about, leave that one blank. And just vote for the ones you care about. Here's the presidential one, here's the gubernatorial one, and you should look in the back; there's one about legalizing cannabis and there's one about undoing gerrymandering.” I think ballot issues are really important, and kids aren't necessarily taught about them in school. So I pointed that out, and I said, “if it was me, I would make sure I voted for these because those affect my life and I would make sure I voted for president.”

Doug: How civically aware would you say these new voters are?

Completely depends. 

Doug: And how much was this instruction that you knew yourself, or that you were trained to offer because they have an FAQ that you should anticipate?

Well, the only instruction was how to navigate the ballot, like how to navigate getting a ballot, how to actually physically fill out the ballot, and then how to put the ballot through the thing.

Doug: So like nothing about a bicameral legislature?

No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. It's really stuff I knew from having voted before. I mean, when we go through the training, they do show you the entire process of all of it. So if you hadn't voted before, you would know how to do it. I think that pretty much everybody under the age of 40 is pretty good at filling out a form, even if it's only because they've filled out forms and surveys online. Right? Like, if you've taken polls and quizzes online, you understand the concept of filling up the ballot. You just have to do it by hand. So that doesn't seem to be a problem for people. And I think also just depends on the age of the new voter. For the Trump election in 2020, I got a handful of people who said, “I'm registered to vote. I didn't know if I was registered to vote at this address because I haven't come in and voted in 20 years, but I just want to vote that guy out.” I was like, “Good! We're glad to see you.”

Doug: And do you get a lot of questions also about straight ticket voting? Because that's a potential to invalidate your whole ballot, right? If you vote straight ticket, then you got to leave the rest of the ballot alone.

Yes, I do get a lot of questions. But here's the thing. If you bubble in the straight ticket thing and then you bubble in some things that are not straight ticket later, the machine rejects it so that people get a chance to redo it.

Yes, I do get a lot of questions.Right, because I know the actual ballot says if you bubble this, don't bubble in anything else.

Yeah, but it doesn't invalidate it unless you vote across whatever. But the machine will tell you. Like, if your vote's invalidated, the machine will tell you and you either fix it if you can or you spoil a ballot. To spoil a ballot just means that you give it back to us. We write spoiled across the UPC code on it and then we note in the electronic poll book that that ballot was spoiled. We assign you a new ballot with a new ballot number. That gets logged, and you go fill out the new ballot. And we genuinely do not care. If one ballot is spoiled, that is slightly annoying because the computer automatically assigns voter number. So now your voter number and your ballot number is off by one. But once that second ballot is spoiled, it's totally fine. We had a guy a couple elections ago who had forgotten his glasses and he spoiled four or five ballots. And then finally I said to him, “Would you like to use the VAT machine? It will mean that you don't need your glasses.” And he said, “well, I'll try it.” And that was my first time actually working with the VAT machine, and now I am going to vote with the VAT machine every time. The VAT machine literally just puts the ballot up on a screen; you can have it read to you, so it's it's for people who have hearing impairments and vision impairments and other impairments. It just shows you the ballot, and it's a touch screen, so you just touch which one you want so you don't have to fill in the thing, and when you're ready you just swipe through and then when you're done you click Yes. And there's a special ballot that just has a number on it, but otherwise it's a blank page and it prints out the whole thing. It looks like the regular ballot, and you just feed it through the machine the same way and then you're done.

Doug: Okay, so it's still paper-based.

Magda: Oh yeah, it's exactly the same ballot, it's just that it's printed right there on site based on what you have touched.

Doug: Well, it's nice to see that technology is improving now as we figure out what Dominion's gonna do with all that luscious Fox money.

I know! So here's something that has been a hot topic and that is absentee ballots, because people think somehow you're able to just request this absentee ballot and somebody could steal it from you or you could vote twice or something like that, and that's not how it works. The way it works in the Michigan system with the electronic poll book is like if you did send in an absentee ballot, and then went to the site–which people do sometimes, they forget that they voted if they did it three weeks ago they maybe forgot that they voted–whichever one hits the electronic poll book first, if it's an absentee ballot that you sent in two weeks ago or if you filled in an absentee ballot and put it in the mail the day before and it doesn't arrive until three days after the election, so your on-site vote hit the electronic poll book first, that's the one that counts. And any other one that comes in afterwards will not be counted. It's a really simple system.

Doug: So are you also looking to work polls in Massachusetts?

No, because I'm a registered voter in Detroit.

Doug: But do you have to be a registered voter in your state to work your state polls?

That's a good question! I don't know. I mean, I would only work elections that were not the same days as the elections in Detroit, so I'm gonna work the general in Detroit. But I don't know! I didn't think about that.

Doug: When is the Massachusetts primary, do you know?

Magda: March 26? I don't know.

Doug: I'm Googling it. March 5th. And the results are pretty much ordained at this point.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's another funny thing about this. I'm thinking, like, I need to bring a book for this. Usually there's enough to do to keep entertained. The polls open at 7, and I was at one precinct for a while where there was always a gentleman who would get there at 6.50 and wait until the poll opened at 7 and vote right then. But the precinct that I work at now, people start to show up about 7.45 and we get a little rush from 7.45 to 9. And then people come in around 11 and there's a little rush from 11 to 1. And then we get a lot of people coming in in work uniforms and scrubs at about 3.30 or 4, and then we get people coming in after dinner at like 6, 6.30 and then the polls close.

Doug: How much do people talk about voting early? Because I voted early the last couple elections and I'll always use that option.

We don't hear it, right? Because if somebody comes into our precinct it's because they haven't voted early.

Doug: Right. But I think in general, did you think that diminishing crowds on Election Day is because more people have caught on to the idea of voting early? I took when Robert voted for the first time, we voted early.

I don't think there are diminishing numbers of people voting. I think if anything, there are more people voting now because of Trump, right? Because they can't vote him out.

Doug: I mean, on Election Day. More voters are coming. But I think many more of them have realized it's easier just to stop by the polling place earlier. there's a line of two people ahead of you because it hasn't really caught on as a big thing to do yet.

Yeah I think that's true. You have much more time to consider all your options and everything, and you drop it off and you don't have to deal with Election Day.

Doug: We’re in a bit of a bubble, because what's the longest you've ever waited to vote? I think for me it was seven minutes. And you get some people, especially in poorer areas, that are waiting three hours or four. And stampeding the joint when they threaten to close it early.

Yeah, we're absolutely in a bubble. My issues with the voting experience in Detroit are that often it's a long walk from the parking lot into the building to the building all the way down to the gym and across the gym.

Doug: And it's along a major highway with no walkways.

Well, so for people who have mobility issues like this is not accommodating at all. It has to be ADA compliant, but that doesn't mean it's really reasonable. I had a voter at one of the precincts that I worked at in 2020 and a little bit in 2021 who had COPD, and it was horrible to have to watch this gentleman walk all the way across the gym to get to our precinct at the back of the gym because of his COPD. So we encouraged him to vote absentee, and I think he did switch to absentee. People didn't used to trust absentee, and then i think COVID also made people afraid of going in in person and so their mistrust of COVID won out over their mistrust of the absentee ballot. At least in Detroit.

Doug: It's going to be an interesting year. I think we're all just kind of girding ourselves for the onslaught of all the marketing and, you know, there's nine months to go.

I mean, the only thing that's really nice about this is there's no Democratic primary, really. So we're not going to have to see all those ads. Last presidential primary in 2020, they had a huge, huge turnout in Detroit, which was 27% of the registered voters for a presidential primary, which is a huge number. And I was at a training when they said they were predicting 12 to 13 percent turnout for this one, and I think that's astronomically high considering that almost everybody in the city who votes is Democratic and on the ballot is Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson who has already I think stopped running for president, some guy named Dean Phillips that I had never heard before, and then a spot for uncontested. And I predict that uncontested will get more votes in the state of Michigan than Dean Phillips will. The only Democrats that are going to turn out for this presidential primary are the people who vote in every election, no matter what, which there are a fair number of them. And then I don't know how many Republicans are going to show up to vote on the Republican ballot. And I looked at it. There are a lot of them. Some people I hadn't even heard of before. Absentee voting has already started. And so I guess we'll see what happens.

Doug: Every election worker I've even interacted with–and I've interacted with a bunch because, you know, Chatty Charlie here will talk to anybody. I've asked them as well about what it's like to be involved. Many of them have worked, you know, 10, 12, 14 elections in a row just because their expertise is valued here. We're kind of on this theme now where we're talking about making new friends and volunteering. Every place online that tells you how to make friends at our age, one of the first things they recommend is get political. Find new people in your area.

I think that's really, really good advice. And I think, again, assess what are your local needs. Right now in Detroit, the needs are for poll workers, which they pretty much have covered. The big need is to get out the vote, helping registered voters figure out how to vote, whether it's at early voting, absentee voting, getting to the polls, right? So if I lived in a place like Detroit where the races weren't going to be contentious and the races weren't going to be deciding a lot–because in Detroit proper it's the City Council, school board, and state senators and reps that are really locally important and can be contentious. But if you're in a place where the actual candidates are contested, the issues are contested, that kind of stuff, I would just pick an issue or pick a candidate, and if there's a website for it or an Instagram page for that issue or that candidate, they're gonna have information about how to get involved. Just fill out the form, and when they text you or call you answer the text or call. They're not going to force you into doing anything that you're not comfortable doing. Like phone banking used to be a big thing. I would not be able to call people on the phone. I did go door to door knocking and flyering for a candidate a couple of years ago, and I really believed in that candidate. She ended up losing, which made me feel just very sad. But I was glad I had done that work. It was not easy for me to do. It was still easier than calling people on the phone would have been. So if you have a particular thing that you don't want to do, they're not going to force you to do it. There are jobs for everyone. But I think it's a good way to meet people who have the same views that you do and who are also willing to put some skin in the game. If you are genuinely at a loss for what to do, figure out if you have a friend who is politically active in the way that you would like to be, even if it's someplace else in the country, because that friend who's politically active is going to be able to figure out how to connect you with somebody in your local area.

Doug: And we can start a discussion in the Facebook group as well about that in terms of what people have done, what people are looking to do. There is a lot of disparate expertise out there just waiting to get shared. By all means, we'll link to the Facebook group and you can go over there and open a question and I know Magda will answer it within 30 seconds.

Magda: You know, there's so many different needs, and it's regional. It's really hyper-local, but it's also the kind of thing that, especially at our age, people can get worried about over-committing and because it is completely 100% seasonal, doing anything political around elections, you cannot get sucked in for the rest of your life. I mean, you could if you wanted to. But you could over-commit and be a little scattered up until the election and then there's genuinely nothing to do after that. So i think sometimes we worry about like, “Whoa, I'm over committing. I'm not gonna have time to do this a year from now.” You're not gonna have to do it a year from now. For me, the real, real secret reason I really like working the polls is I go in at 5 a.m, I come out at 9, and drive my stuff to the Pistons training center, and they count it. In the meantime–I mean, I'm in touch with the outside world, like if somebody texts me I can

read the text–I am not watching the results come in from other races and feeling anxious about it. And that is the thing: I have a job to do, helping the people of Detroit make sure their votes count and are registered and it's completely legal and lawful and according to policy. And that is what I am doing on Election Day instead of freaking out about results.

Doug: That gets back to the initial point, right? People are looking for agency, and you can soothe whatever anxiety you feel if you have a little bit more knowledge of how the sausage is being made.

Yeah, until you pull the numbers on the tabulator at the end of the night. So at the end of the night you know everybody's fed their ballots through and then you put all the ballots in one envelope, because they go in this repository in, I don't know, Macomb County or something like that, because the idea is every person who came in, you have in the electronic poll book: the number of the ballot that they voted. So if somebody came back 10 years later and was like, “I think you miscounted my vote in this election and whatever whatever,” we could go find the envelope with their ballot in it and use the electronic poll book to match up the number of their ballot and look and see what they bubbled in, right? So this is the whole system of checks and balances of the process. At the end of the night you pull those ballots out and then you have to press to the to run the tabulator and it tells you for each candidate how many votes they got and what the percentage was. And sometimes it's a little disheartening, like there's an issue or a candidate or something like that and you're like, “how did that person get six votes? I didn't think anyone was gonna vote for that person!” And then you try to think back, like “I wonder if I know which voters were the ones that voted for that.”

Doug: Well, but that's how you particularly would keep your mind busy during the slow times, I would imagine, too.

Well, we can't tabulate until the very end of the night. So we don't have any idea how it's done.

Doug: No, but you know what I mean. When you're trapped in a room, you're working in a room with not a lot to do, the hamster wheel starts going.

Magda: Yeah, it's true. And people are not supposed to wear any buttons or t-shirts or anything like that for any political candidate at all, let alone the ones that are being voted on at our precinct. But, you know, people walk in and they'll tell you, “hey I came to vote for whoever Benny Sanderson.”

Doug: I'm a big supporter of Benny Sanderson. I think he's got a lot to say.

Magda: I just think that if people are feeling anxious about anything even remotely political, the way to medicate your anxiety about it is to get involved somehow and do something because if you are doing something even if your side loses you have done something and you can feel satisfied that you are at least working to change the landscape and the problem.

Doug: I don't know about you, but now that I'm in my late 50s and you're about to turn 51

Magda: I know! At which point I'll be in my 50s instead of 50.

Doug: You're in your 50s now.

Magda: No, I'm not. I'm 50.

Doug: How can you be 50 and not in your 50s?

Magda: Because 50 is the 10 of the 40s.

Doug: Right, and that's the end of your fifth decade and you're about to start your sixth decade. So welcome to that.

Magda: Thanks.

Doug: But I do think that one of the ways to kind of think about your longevity is to think about your goals in a much more intangible way. Just like, ”I want agency in my life. I want community in my life. I want purpose. I want amusement. I want to be able to keep my body in shape, my mind in shape, and feel as though I belong where I am.” And getting politically active wherever you are, I think, checks a lot of boxes.

Magda: Yeah, I agree.

Doug: So what are we doing for your birthday?

Magda: The question now is “what have we done for my birthday?” Because it was two days before people are going to be listening to this.

Doug: Right. So, what did you do for your birthday, and why was it fabulous?

Magda: I don't have any idea.

Doug: Wow so you were blind drunk the whole time? You blacked out?

Magda: OK, let's just shut this down. We're not saying anything important at this point.

Doug: Well, bottom line is we're going to set up a discussion topic in the Facebook group about getting involved politically, whether that includes working your actual voting place or just canvassing or contacting a local ism in your neighborhood. You will find people there and you will find as much work as you want. Once you answer one text, you're going to get a billion because all of a sudden the software says, “hey, this guy actually talked.”

Magda: I don't think you really are. I don't think you're going to get a billion texts after you answer one. 

Doug: Are you spammed any more or any less since you became a poll worker?

Less, and when I am, I just say “I already voted, I'm working the polls on Election Day.” And then they said, “OK thanks! We'll take you off our list.”

Doug: Wow! There's your incentive right there, right? Wow!

Magda: You know one of the principal rules of living is “Choose your own job so somebody else doesn't give you one.”

Doug: Hey, I like that. That's a good point. And it's just one of the many points you'll get here on the When the Flames Go Up podcast. Thank you for listening to Episode 36 with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been our imperiled democracy. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter every Friday, which will arrive in your inbox. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please give us a review there. That really helps. We will see you next week for Episode 37. Until then, find out when your primary is and vote in it. I think you'll be glad you did. Bye-bye.