European Elections-who wants to be a polling clerk?

This is how I spent my day....I was up before 5am to make sure I arrived at the polling station by 6:15am to help set up ready for the 7am opening. You must be mad I hear you say...I can tell you as I was walking to the local library, where the computer room was to be the polling station, I too thought I was mad. Then I thought about earning a day's pay and decided I'd made the right decision.
Anyone who voted in the elections yesterday, will have seen the yellow voting form above, and know the huge range of parties who were trying to gain seats in the European Parliament. In fact there were 17 parties from which one could vote for only one.
It was such a small room we could only set up 3 of the voting booths. We were well organised and ready before opening time and then felt quite disappointed when we only had a handful of voters come through the door in in the first few hours. This meant that the time passed very slowly. This is a job where you don't get a break, you eat and drink when there is a quiet period. Not particularly satisfactory as every time I tried to eat a sandwich someone walked in to vote.

We were a little busier in the evening but only ended up with having 252 voters out of a possible 1181 registered to vote (although out of these about 230 opted to make a postal vote). I'm no good at working out percentages but it seems pretty low to me. My guess is this was pretty similar to many other areas of the country.

We had the last voters come through the door at 9:30pm (the guys said they came during the adverts on TV which made us chuckle). At 10pm we were able to pack everything away and come home. I have to say, although it wasn't hard work, it was very tiring just being sat on a hard chair for so many hours, I'm feeling quite stiff now. Would I do it again......probably as I never say "NO' to earning a bit of extra money!!

Archives:
2008: Witty Wednesday-52
2007: Fun Monday-19-Crafty Monday