I voted, of course, and I was glad to go to bed last Tuesday night with the knowledge that my guy had won a second term. But I also had good memories of having worked all afternoon on election day in a nonpartisan phone bank at one of our local TV stations. Here’s my beloved talking about it with Larry Conners, the Channel 4 news anchor. Our local League of Women Voters is one of the most active in the country. We have produced a voters’ guide in collaboration with the St. Louis Post Dispatch for some years now, and we all hope to continue the partnership with KMOV through future elections.

I worked election day afternoon until the polls closed at 7:00 p. m., answering calls from people with problems. The most common problems seemed to be with registration: people who had failed to file changes of address when they moved, weren’t sure whether they were registered, or didn’t know where their polling place was. In some cases I was able to tell callers how they could vote, but I had to explain to other callers that they had waited too long to register and would have to wait for the next election.

Though we did have difficulty at some polling places in the city, not uncommon in St. Louis. My beloved and I stood in line for two hours when we voted mid morning because our polling place was short staffed and had only three voting machines, a sharp contrast with 2008 when there had been plenty of staff and thirty or forty voting machines at the same site. I answered a good many calls in the afternoon from other voters who had encountered difficulties at the polls, all the way from illegal demands for picture IDs to the one caller who had gone to her polling place shortly after 6:00 p. m. and found it had closed early. We passed problems such as these on to a team of lawyers at the Election Protection group, but KMOV also sent investigative reporters to ferret out information about as many problems as time permitted them to investigate.

All in all it was a good day. I worked for some years as an election judge here until I passed my 70th birthday and decided to retire. During that time I saw a lot of incompetence and misconduct on the part of election officials—so, what I heard on the phone this past election day didn’t surprise me. Still, most citizens here voted without difficulty. It was pretty intense, working in the phone bank, pretty much one call after another for the last three hours or so. But I enjoyed the experience and will do it again if I’m offered the chance. It reminded me a little of working in voter registration drives and precinct politics when I was young.