First, and most important: Don't expect to beat the line by showing up before the polls open. A lot of other people have the same idea. We show up half an hour early, and barely have time to power up, wipe down, and calibrate the touch screens before the doors open. The resulting backlog is slow to resolve because there are always problems inherited from the previous day (remember that shift change thing I mentioned?). It seems to take us about an hour to find our rhythm. After that there's only a line if a big cluster of people arrive at the same time.   

If you would like to start with part 1 of this series, Opening Day, you can find it here:

https://steemit.com/election/@plotbot2015/i-work-the-polls-part-1-opening-day

I have complicated feelings about leadership. 

One effect of being an information junkie with a reasonably good memory is that I know things, and people come to me with questions. I usually try to help, and not to be all Cliff Claven about it, but the truth is that my role models were mostly comic book superheroes. They wear masks for a reason. While they're willing to risk their lives in the moment for real emergencies, they also want to go home at night and not be harrassed with petty political or bureacratic bullshit. Filling out forms is not heroic to those people.   

(They're kind of wrong, by the way. Bruce Wayne's continual band-aid generosity does at least as much good as the Batman's band-aid punishment of criminals. Still, it's hard to shake one's early influences.)   

[source]

Aside from the opportunity to reference the Outsiders, one of my favorite teams from '80s comics, I mention leadership because I worked a twelve-hour shift at the polls on Friday and another seven-hour shift on Sunday. On Saturday we had two experienced site supervisors, the same pair I worked with previously on Thursday, both of whom stayed relatively unruffled. The network going down in the middle of reconciling the paper identity records to the voting machine ballot counts earned nothing more than a “dammit!” and a call downtown. The network came back up on its own while he was on hold. On Sunday we had a single supervisor, who had considerably less experience with the machines, and seemed personally less confident because of that. This meant that when a voting machine ran out of paper or had some other minor problem, it took longer to get fixed, which meant we had fewer machines open. Plus, we were slightly busier on Sunday, on a per-hour basis.   

~800 / 10.5 ~ 76 per hour on Saturday

vs.

~500 / 6 ~ 83 per hour on Sunday   

This led to slightly longer lines, when there were lines.    The change in leadership had other small ripple effects throughout the rest of the team, in the form of a bit more grumbling about the fact that we were down a person, that we never really get to take the full time on our required breaks. Small things, but over a shift those can add up. I was happy to leave after twelve hours on Saturday, but if I had been asked to stay to learn some specific supervisor-level task, I probably would have. On Sunday, I ran the numbers, cleaned up, and did everything I already knew how to do. Then I put on my helmet and biked home with nary a look over my shoulder. Anything else was above my pay grade. Let the salaried and benefited county workers handle it.   

Still, of the three days that I worked, this was the fastest reconciliation we've done. 

The team as a unit is learning, regardless of who's “in charge.” But that's not good enough for many people. This Nature editorial from last year calls for leadership training for scientists.   

I did a tour of Greensboro's Center for Creative Leadership once. It's this huge, posh campus in the woods on the north side of town, where corporate types from all over the world come for training. They also have sites in other countries. As far as I can tell from their website, most of their leadership training is really just teamwork training, based on Myers-Briggs personality type testing from the 1960s – recognize when and how your personality is bumping up against someone else's personality, that kind of thing, some of which might be useful in the specific case of academics I mentioned above.   

Amidst all the cheerleading, there are articles pointing out the total bogosity of America's corporate obssession with leadership going back at least ten years (check the REFERENCES below). The one at the top asks why we pressure people to take on more responsibility than they are ready for, or even want. In the case of poll workers, the answer to that is pretty clear:  There aren't enough of us, and it's not a great job. One certainly could not make a living as a poll worker, or even as a supervisor. There's more to it, though. Humans love stories, and especially stories about heroes. They tickle our emotions in a reliable way that ambitious people can use to get our support for whatever ego-stroking project they're pushing at the moment.   

'Presidential candidates, of course, invoke the idea of leadership with special urgency. In his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz praised Rick Perry, Glenn Beck, and other “leaders who have stood and led”; in the sixteen Presidential debates since August, candidates have used the word “leadership” more than a hundred times. It’s an especially useful term for politicians. “Experience” and “expertise” are virtues with downsides. “Leadership” sums up, in a vague way, everything that’s desirable and none of what’s not.'   

Not having read any of these particular articles on Sunday, this was the criticism I made to some of my teammates on the floor of the polls during a lull, while I was snipping a preparatory pile of those little round “I Voted Today!” stickers off the roll with a pair of blue-handled safety scissors:    

“I hate both political parties just about equally, because neither of them is much interested in doing any actual work. They're just interested in winning.”   

They didn't applaud, exactly, but there was a lot of nodding, and one of them thanked me for putting his thoughts into words.   

There's a substantial anarchist component to Steemit's audience. 

I personally don't take it that far. I'm more into the idea of temporary, situational leadership, in the sense that every individual is probably an expert at something, and should be in charge when that thing is relevant, simply because s/he knows the most about it. The second article down there calls these emergent leaders. I'm also interested in system-level ways to distribute authority, as in this short story where simple police duties like issuing citations are devolved to narrowly trained citizen deputies. I personally would love the ability to ticket speeders with my very own radar gun. 

Now there's a training that I'd pay for.   

When he's not fantasizing about zapping evildoers, Randall Hayes blogs here on Steemit (follow here) and writes the monthly PlotBot column for the online SF magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.   

REFERENCES    

http://www.inc.com/sarah-vermunt/leadership-obsession-is-killing-our-companies-and-our-people.html   

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/our-dangerous-leadership-obsession   

https://medium.com/personal.../ending-our-obsession-with-leadership-883798a1e169   

www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/...obsessed...leadership/283253/   

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-dangerous-obsession-with-leadership/  

http://www.management-issues.com/news/3698/obsession-with-leadership-undermining-organisations/   

https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it