After producing the film Election Day and witnessing the hard work and commitment of pollworkers around the country, I was inspired to work as a pollworker myself. So in the mid-term election of 2006, my friend Anayansi and I got up at the crack of dawn to serve as election officials in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We had been through a rather pathetic 2-hour training at the board of elections a couple weeks earlier. (If you passed the open-book exam at the end, you got a $30 bonus. If not, no problem! Go ahead and work the polls anyway!)

One piece of information that clearly did not sink in with most pollworkers was the nature of a provisional ballot. The biggest problem we had during the day was people whose names were not on the voter list. In some cases, they had been voting at that site for many years, and we presumed it was a database error. In other cases, we had to help them figure out if they were at the correct precinct, which sometimes they weren’t. In other cases, they were newly-registered voters and it was unclear if their registration had even been processed. If the voter’s name was not on the list, had moved within New York City, had a missing or wrong signature, or did not have the required ID, the voter had two options: vote on a provisional (aka affidavit) ballot or march down to the local board of elections office to obtain a court order to vote on an election machine.

This second option was rarely presented to voters. Instead, they were often assured, “An affidavit ballot is the exact same as voting on the machine; it will be counted.” But the pollworker doesn’t know that. It is the board of elections office that will later determine if that provisional/affidavit ballot is valid. And it will be days or weeks after Election Day, after the vote is final, when the voter has no recourse.

In their article on voting pitfalls in Rolling Stone, Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast wrote:

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed “provisional” ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA (http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm ) to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots—as many as 1 million votes—were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

There was one voter that day in Brooklyn who was justifiably outraged that his name was not on the list and he took me up on the offer to go down to the board of elections that day. He knew that his individual vote was that important. Unfortunately, in many states, the option to demand a regular ballot or a court order does not exist as it does in New York.

I asked my favorite source on election reform issues, Tova Andrea Wang at Common Cause, what a voter should do if handed a provisional ballot.

Tova says: [Demanding a regular ballot] is not an option in most places. Provisional ballots should certainly be a last option, not a first. They should make sure they are in the right polling place — and if they’re not, find out the right one and go there — and be sure to find out what they need to do to ensure the provisional ballot is counted.

I encourage all voters to be prepared on Election Day. Contact your local board of elections in advance to find out what will be required of you and where you need to vote. takepart Contact Election Protection before or on Election Day for assistance.

(From samantha davies‘ flickr photostream)