Voting increased in SLO County on Tuesday — but in-person polling continues to dwindle
I am a proud member of a dying breed: the in-person voter.
Sure, voting by mail is more convenient, but there’s something almost sacred about casting a ballot at your neighborhood polling place on Election Day.
After all the storm and stress of the campaign — the obnoxious ads, the nasty mailers, the trumped-up scandals — the decorum of the polling place is a relief, a reminder that this is what living in a democracy is all about.
Even the rituals are soothing:
Waiting in line for your turn to be checked in (as long as the wait isn’t too long).
Exchanging pleasantries with the poll workers as they look up your name in the big binder of registered voters.
Taking the blank ballot to a “booth” — nowadays a cardboard shield to give you some privacy — and marking in the bubbles.
And finally, accepting the “I Voted” sticker as proof that, yes, you did your civic duty.
Sorry, but dropping a ballot in a mail box — or even an official ballot drop box — just doesn’t have the same cachet.
Apparently, though, fewer and fewer voters share that feeling. Judging by Tuesday’s election, neighborhood polling places are an anachronism, like telephone booths, video stores and typewriter repair shops.
There just isn’t much of a demand for the service anymore — at least not on this Election Day, when polling place workers often outnumbered actual voters.
Mail-in balloting, though, was another story.
After getting off to an exceptionally slow start last month, those ballots were coming in hot and heavy.
“Today we probably had our biggest return,” County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said around noon on Tuesday.
The office had already received approximately 5,000 ballots by mail at that point, and many more were picked up at county drop boxes.
Meanwhile, at county polling places, it was painfully slow going.
While several voters dropped off ballots that had already been filled out, few were asking to go through the steps required to vote the old-fashioned way.
That left polling place workers with time on their hands.
At my polling place, one worker did a crossword puzzle. Others quietly chatted among themselves, anxiously scanning doorways for “customers.”
“Wake up, somebody,” a man joked as I walked through the door.
I got oodles of attention as I went through the process of surrendering by mail-in ballot, which was replaced with another ballot. (Agreed, it does seem like a waste of paper.)
Turnout was equally sparse at another polling place a few miles away, though it was a little busier at the regional South County Library.
Joyce and Mike Miller of Arroyo Grande were among the in-person voters there.
“I don’t believe in mail-in voting,” Mike Miller said. His wife nodded in agreement; both worried about fraudulent voting.
Nostalgia is another reason for preferring precinct voting over vote-by-mail.
SLO County Supervisor John Peschong brought that up last year, when he rejected the idea of switching to a system that would replace neighborhood polling places with 20 regional voting centers.
Senior citizens, Peschong said, “like to vote at the polling locations” and would be “disenfranchised” if the county switched to voting centers.
The Board of Supervisors wound up voting 3-2 to keep neighborhood polling places, though that decision could be revisited at some point.
It probably is inevitable that polling places will be consolidated into regional centers at some point.
Now that all registered voters in California receive a vote-by-mail ballot — a decision made by the state Legislature — it seems more efficient to operate 20 voting centers, versus the 58 SLO County polling places that were staffed by between 500 and 600 workers for this election.
That would mean that diehards like me who want to hang on to some reminder of the old days would have to travel a few extra miles to get the rush that comes from in-person voting.
As long as I can still get that “I Voted” sticker, I’m OK with that.
This story was originally published June 7, 2022 at 1:57 PM.
