Are We Having Fun Yet?

This past Tuesday was a special election for a county-wide school millage. As usual I worked as a chair for Ann Arbor at the Senior Center (ward 3 precinct 24), though by now we were the sole precinct there. I had six workers (one of whom I'd worked with before and one of whom was working their first election ever), which was more than enough people.

We started slow with 11 voters in our first hour, but then picked up to a pretty consistent 14–15 voters per hour until 4pm, where we picked up speed. Our last five hours were our busiest and the 6–7pm hour the busiest of them all. We eventually averaged about 22 voters per hour on the day:

Time	8am	9am	10am	11am	12n	1pm	2pm	3pm	4pm	5pm	6pm	7pm	8pm
Total (Σ)	11	29	41	56	69	85	104	118	140	169	211	243	275
Delta (𝚫)	11	18	12	15	13	16	19	14	22	29	42	32	32
Rate (∫)	11	15	14	14	14	14	15	15	16	17	20	21	22

We were finished in-precinct by 8:35pm — in large part due to it being a one-box ballot and thus the reports printed quickly — and headed off to City Hall because the Election Headquarters building was being renovated. (Seriously, the landlord or property manager couldn't've waited to kick us out until Wednesday? They had to do it Monday night after the chairs picked up our notebooks and laptops?) We were the 6th precincts to report in. We had a brief wait to turn in our ballots, laptop, and zippered notebook, then a moderate wait to get our reports printed, then a brief wait for a receiving board to open up to process our paperwork. We finished up at HQ around 9:15pm and I was home by 9:30pm.

The biggest problem of the day was construction-related traffic on Washtenaw Ave. They closed one of two lanes eastbound just past the Y-intersection at Stadium. The backup was bad enough at my 11am lunch trip that I eschewed going out for my 4pm dinner and instead had Domino's deliver a pizza and salad. (Even then, with them coming from State and Packard, the 4:00–4:15pm scheduled delivery didn't get there until 4:27pm.) I scarfed down most of the pizza for dinner and had the rest as a snack once I got home and had the salad with dinner on Wednesday.

(Incidentally, back on August 5 we had an election and as usual I worked as a chair for Ann Arbor at the Senior Center (3–24). I never wrote it up but I did save the hourly stats:

Time	8am	9am	10am	11am	12n	1pm	2pm	3pm	4pm	5pm	6pm	7pm	8pm
Total (Σ)	11	41	52	67	87	100	120	142	171	1207	248	300	353
Delta (𝚫)	11	30	22	15	20	13	20	22	29	36	41	52	53
Rate (∫)	11	20	17	16	17	16	17	17	19	20	22	25	22

I had four workers, one of whom I'd worked with before. From what I recall we were something like the 12th or 13th precinct reporting into Election HQ at the end of the evening and I was almost certainly home by 10:30pm.)