Polling Booth, Scout Hall, 8am to Close

I've done six election days as a polling official and the thing nobody tells you is how much of it is pencils. You arrive at seven. The hall is a scout hall, or a church hall, or a primary school with the little chairs stacked in the corner. You set up the cardboard booths, which come flat-packed and never quite go back into shape. You count the pencils. You tie a pencil to each booth with the string they give you, and by nine o'clock two of the pencils have been stolen anyway, and you tie new ones. My booth was at the scout hall in a town of about four thousand. Officer in charge was a woman called Denise who'd done thirty of these and who moved through the day like weather. Six of us. A queue by eight that went out the door and past the sausage sizzle, which the Rotary had running before we'd finished putting the booths up. You don't talk about the candidates. You can't. You don't have a view, for fourteen hours, and it's the most restful thing I do all year. A man comes in furious about something and you say, "Name and address, please," and mark him off, and hand him two ballot papers, one small and one the size of a tablecloth, and point him at a booth, and that's all he is to you. A name on a roll. A line through it. The tablecloth one is the Senate. People unfold it and their faces fall. Around eleven a man of about seventy stood at my table and said he wanted to know who'd decided the order of the names, because it was obviously rigged, and I said it was a random draw, and he said "random," like that was a party. I said "name and address, please." He gave them. I handed him the papers. He went to a booth and stood in it for eleven minutes, which is long, and came out and put both in the box very carefully, and on the way past me he said, "Still random," and I said, "Have a good day," and I meant it.

A woman in her nineties came in with her granddaughter holding her elbow. She'd voted, she told the whole hall, in every election since she was twenty-one. The granddaughter tried to help her with the tablecloth and she said, "I can manage," and she did, slowly, and when she put it in the box a couple of people in the queue clapped and she looked annoyed at that. Lunch was a sausage in bread from the Rotary, standing up, eaten in four minutes. Afternoon is slow. Then four o'clock and the people who've worked all day come in with their work on them, hi-vis and scrubs and aprons, and it's fast again until six. Close is six sharp. Denise stood at the door at 5:59 with her watch out and at 6:00 she said, "Doors," and we shut them, and there were four people inside who'd made it and one outside who hadn't, and you could see him through the glass working out whether to argue, and he didn't. Then the count. You open the box. You tip it out on a trestle table. Six people who have not sat down since seven in the morning sort paper into piles under a light that's too bright, and Denise calls the numbers, and someone from each party stands behind you and watches and says nothing, which is their right. We finished at ten past nine. Denise said, "Good day," and it was the first opinion she'd offered since seven. I drove home. The pencils were still in my pocket.