During the next couple of weeks, my posts may be a bit sporadic — if at all. I decided earlier this year to answer the call for people to serve as election clerks in Dona Ana County and I’ve been assigned to do an early voting job in Mesilla starting Saturday, Oct. 22. By the time you read this post, I will have worked my first shift.
With all the rhetoric surrounding the security of our elections, I thought it would be worthwhile to volunteer my time to get involved in the vote gathering process.
I’ve already attended a couple of training sessions and my role will be to process same day registration requests.
My observation so far is that the entire election process, at least here in Dona Ana County, is very professionally done with multiple security steps to ensure that the process is free of any outside influences, political or otherwise. No one has told me to flip a switch to favor certain candidates or do anything like that.
However, when doing my training last week to check the absentee ballot drop box outside the Mesilla Town Hall, my trainer, Carlos, passed on some interesting information. I asked him if the drop boxes sometimes contained unusual things that people had dropped in them.
“It’s pretty hard to get anything large in there because the slot is so small,” he said. “However, at the Las Cruces City Hall drop box, there are occasionally black widow spiders living inside that you have to be careful about.”
So is a spider infestation a Democrat or Republican ploy to keep voters away? Or just a random act of nature? I’m sure it is the latter, but if you have comments or thoughts, I’d love to see them. And with the recent infestation of scorpions in our neighborhood in Mesilla Park and probably in Mesilla, I hope none of those critters decide to make a home in the drop box I will be attending.
So far, I’ve been sort of overwhelmed by learning the acronyms for the process and remembering the steps I have to go through to take same day registration requests. I still have a lot of “what if” questions, but I think I can get the job done.
There was a story in the Albuquerque Journal last week quoting our Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse Oliver that she expects additional challenges during the election process this year. I can understand that, given the current political climate, and am looking forward to see how that may play out in what I will be doing.
At any rate, I promise to be completely apolitical during the process (I willingly took an oath to that effect) but I will be observant about what I may report on this blog in the future. Because I’ll be working several hours per day, I may not have time to write new blog posts, so I hope you’ll forgive me for the lapses.
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