Poll position
Some voting laws need to be cast aside
Marty Kain introduced me to a leatheroid last week. You can win a lot of bar bets off a leatheroid. Hint: It's found neither on the gridiron nor in outer space.
A leatheroid, it turns out, is a Boston election term, as arcane as a Masonic rite, for the black leather box in which election ballots and attendant paraphernalia used to be kept.
Since 2004, it has played second fiddle to a large metal box that looks like a giant
The leatheroids, poor old things, will hold forgettables like envelopes. There is also a blue bag I swear is called Envelope A.
Kain is the city's head trainer of volunteer poll workers and has run 19 two-hour sessions around town for Tuesday. He has the patience of Job and the ability to defuse chaos with the unnerving calm of Mister Rogers.
I caught up with him in Roxbury last week at two of his road shows -- one at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Towers and the other at the Dudley Branch Library. Close to 100 people showed up for each, mostly older black women who were veteran poll workers.
Kain arrive d with instruction booklets as thick as sirloins that spell out what to do on everything from provisional ballots to inactive voters. These things are well put-together but inevitably raise a slew of questions.
Retirees dominate the ranks of poll workers because they have the time and can use the money. A warden, the top dog at each site, gets $175; a clerk, second in command, gets $150; and inspectors, the worker bees, get $135. The election department knows it needs more younger people in the mix and has rustled up 150 Suffolk University students to work on Tuesday. Bravo Suffolk. Let's all do it next time.
Kain tells the groups that by state law, wardens and clerks must remain at their posts the whole time. Inspectors are expected to do so , too, while interpreters can work part time. The police, whose presence is required throughout the day, often divide the task between two officers.
I don't know about you, but I'm worthless after 15 hours. Someone asks me about provisional ballots along about then and I'm spouting, "Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey."
Who wouldn't be gaga at the end of a 15-hour day? The polls open at 7 a.m. and workers must be on site no later than 6:15. The polls close at 8 p.m., at which point all of your mental acuity is needed to check tallies and perform a host of other administrative tasks.
Witness the September fiasco in the Second Suffolk State Senatorial District primary, when workers in eight precincts just didn't count the ballots. (That was the write-in rodeo starring the ethically challenged incumbent, Dianne Wilkerson. ) It was appalling.
"They were appalling but the other 65 precincts performed perfectly," said Geraldine Cuddyer, chair woman of the Board of Commissioners of the election department. This answer plays better in Belarus than Boston.
There is no earthly reason why two people shouldn't split the warden and clerk jobs into morning and afternoon shifts. You're asking for trouble if you don't. I asked Secretary of State Bill Galvin about the current inanity, and he told me there's no such requirement in state law.
"It's the title, not the person, that matters," he explained. "The purpose is not to keep the same person there. This is not a decathlon." So the same warden who opens the polling site does not have to close it. "They're so obsessed with ritual that they lose sight of the point of the ritual," he said about Boston . "At times, the process there takes on a medieval tint."
Cuddyer reread the state law after I brought Galvin's judgment to her attention, and conceded there's nothing in it mandating the marathon presence of warden and clerk. Galvin assumes the rule is embedded some where in the thicket of Special Acts that Boston has adopted over the years.
I asked Cuddyer, a very nice woman, whether it is indeed there or whether it's simply a custom hatched in the late Jurassic period. She had a city lawyer pore through the acts who found no trace of it. There exists no legal requirement, then, for Boston to require its two top election officers at each site to endure 15 hours on the job.
There's more. Boston is the only municipality in the state that requires police to transport the ballots to and from polling sites. This costs money. State law requires only a police presence at polling sites to keep order. There is no reason to keep Boston police officers on the ballot patrol. This is yet another charming local statute that should be vaporized.
Someone in City Hall needs to blow the cobwebs off the Special Acts and curl up with them on a rainy weekend. It would be nifty to know what they actually say, what makes sense, and what needs to be canned. Just don't touch the leatheroids.
Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com. 