Will Prescott, a 75-year-old Guadalajara resident and former Peace Corps volunteer, took out Mexican citizenship two years ago and voted for the first time July 1.
Not only did the lifelong Democrat exercise his right to vote, but Prescott also signed up to serve as an election observer for Arbolito, the umbrella group for various independent candidates running in both federal and local elections.
“Jumping in at the deep end” is how Prescott describes his first encounter with Mexico’s election system. Here are some observations of his experiences on election day that he posted on his blog at theprescotts.com.
“My involvement in the voting, in addition to voting for the first time, was as an observer for one of the political parties,” he begins.
“A month before the election I took a class explaining the duties of a ‘representante de casilla’ (literally polling place representative). However, partly because it was all new to me and partly because my comprehension of Spanish still leaves a lot to be desired, I didn’t get everything they said and retained even less. So the day of the election, I had a pretty fuzzy idea of what I had to do. I knew I had to show up at the polling station at 7:15 a.m. in the morning and at the end I had to take photographs of the results.
The voting station was in a nursery school building a couple of blocks from my house. There were seven other representantes besides me, all representing real political parties – a couple each from Morena and PRI, one each from PAN and PRD, and one other.
The first voters, a couple about my age, showed up at 7:40 a.m. However, it took until about 9 a.m. before everything was set up and we were ready to start accepting voters. By the time we opened for business a pretty good line of people were waiting.
Calling us observers didn’t really capture our responsibilities at all. We were each wearing a very small pin identifying which party we represented. We were the only people allowed to wear any party identification in the polling place.
Part of the duties of the representantes was to ensure no one who was not on the voter roll cast a ballot and that no one on the list was turned away.
All of the other parties had provided their representantes with a list of all of the voters assigned to vote in our casilla. So as voters arrived, the representantes checked their names on their copy of the list. I had not been provided with a list by Arbolito so I contented myself with keeping a count of the number of people voting.
On the rare occasions when there was a debate about whether someone could legally vote, the party representatives were included in the discussion.
I was also assigned to a ‘representante general’ who supervised a group of Arbolito observers. She came by a couple of times during the day to check up on me and see if I needed anything and also brought me a sandwich, water and an apple for lunch.
When the polls closed at 6 p.m., the ballot counting started. We essentially split into two groups, one counting the federal ballots and another the local ballots. The representantes were not allowed to touch any ballots but were required to verify the counts and approve all of the numbers. We had to sign all of the election documents, verifying the opening and closing of the poll and all of the ballot counts. A great deal of attention was paid to making sure that we could see what was done and agreed with the process and results.
With 466 voters and six ballots for each voter there were some 3,000 pieces of paper to be counted. All the counting was done by hand. The first step was to pirate some light bulbs from nearby sockets, since the sockets over the work area didn’t have bulbs in them and it was clear our work would continue after dark. Then, all of the unused ballots were marked with a line through them so they could not be used. The unused ballots were all counted so they could be accounted for. Then one at a time, the ballot boxes were dumped out on a table or on the floor. Those counting local ballots used a table and the federal group used the floor, because there wasn’t enough table surface available.
The ballots were counted and any discrepancy against the number of voters was discussed. Then all the ballots were manually sorted into piles based on which boxes were checked.
All of this unfolding, sorting and counting for all six ballot boxes took about six hours, until around midnight. After this was completed, the paperwork started. All of the totals were transferred to large sheets, one for each of the six positions.
Each of the representantes took a cellphone photo of all the vote tallies and some of the other forms and sent them to their general headquarters by WhatsApp. Finally at about 1 a.m., each representante was given a copy of all of the forms and we were done. On Monday after the election, I turned all the copies in to the Arbolito headquarters.
It was a weird mix of technologies. The party representatives all communicated with their supervisors through social media but the officials doing the formal counts recorded all the numbers on pieces of paper, manually adding all the totals with a cellphone calculator. It was a pretty laborious process and could all have been made much faster and more accurate with some pretty simple changes – such as switching to a form of ballot that could be read by a machine. Some of them would have been really cheap to implement, for example using a laptop computer program to record all the tallies and then a printer to produce the hard copies.
Incidentally the turnout in our casilla was 460 voters out of 750 registered—so about 61 percent.”
Originally published at: <a href="/https://www.theprescotts
Photo Credit: William Prescott