Ward 54, Where Are You?

by Lisa Poe

Reporting to Committee of Seventy’s headquarters at 1:30 p.m. on Election Day, I was assigned to an existing field team in Ward 54 in northeast Philadelphia. My team members were Phil Beck, a freelance journalist who has worked for several local newspapers, and Kelly Green, a 32-year-old new mother who has been active behind the scenes in Philadelphia politics since she was 16. They had worked together poll watching for Committee of Seventy for the past five elections, and were old hands at the whole procedure.

I felt fortunate to be assigned to a team with experienced members, as I was unsure how difficult my job might be. Phil advised that I should always refer to the Judges of Elections by their title rather than their name, because many of the Judges were selected that morning on the spot and would be unsure of their authority. As he explained, someone from Committee of Seventy saying, “thank you for your time, Judge,” would give them “a sense of empowerment” they might not otherwise feel.

As it turned out, my job could not have been easier. The Judges of Elections in all divisions were unanimous in saying that the number of voters was up, but that they were not having any problems with the machines, the procedures, or voter identification.

From what I observed, the efforts to get out the vote for this election were amazingly successful. In every division we visited in the ward, the number of voters was reported as being double the usual number.

Despite these high turnout numbers, I never once saw a line of more than 10 people at any polling place and there were often only two or three people at any location. I don’t know if voters had spread themselves out during the day or if there had been a huge rush in the morning, but the expected long lines of people never materialized. I sometimes felt that I was chasing a rumor, but the numbers matched the reports. Some divisions had close to 90% turnout!

There was one problem that Kelly and I noted on our trip to Divisions 2 and 3. The voting machines for both divisions were located at Spruance Elementary School, but had been placed on the stage in the school auditorium rather than on the floor. Although the Judges of Elections for both divisions claimed that there were no difficulties and no voter complaints, Kelly and I observed an elderly lady with a cane having difficulty climbing the stairs to the stage. This was a clear violation of the principle that all voters should easily be able to reach their polling location.

Dennis Woodrow, the voluble Judge of Elections for Division 6, was the only one to sound a cynical note about the day. He joked that he had been doing this for so many years that he finally had to sell his house and move out of Philadelphia to prevent his division from re-electing him next year. Dennis said that he used to believe in the election process until he got a chance to see it from the inside. He advised me to quit my non-partisan poll monitoring and get a job as a poll worker and I would “lose all [my] faith in the system.”

Several of his colleagues agreed, telling me I should become a ward leader or committee woman if I wanted to know what Philadelphia politics was really like. At first, it was disheartening to hear this from men in their 60’s who have been involved in local politics most of their lives. However, despite Dennis’ claim that “you take an honest person, put him in office, six months later he’s a crook,” it turned out that what had stopped his continued election work was a quadruple bypass and a bad leg, not disillusionment.

Many poll workers reported that first-time voters did not know where their polling place was located and would often go to the first one they saw. The poll workers would then try to help them locate the correct polling location, giving directions or letting the voters use the workers’ cell phones to call the election hotline.

This spirit of cooperation and enabling the vote was the rule in Ward 54. It was inspiring to be a part of the process this year rather than sitting in front of my computer or television screen obsessing over projected returns. As Iris Cohen, Judge of Elections in Division 1, put it best, people were “just so happy to be able to vote for president.”