ok, that is not what you wrote. “Done online, period”
You know what I mean!
actually, with you, no I didn’t
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That’s too bad. Well now you do. And I bet you agree with me.
There’s two different things here that are often conflated but are actually extremely different: poll watchers and poll workers.
Poll workers are employed by the county/parish to run the polls. These are the folks who check your driver’s license, have you sign in, hand you a ballot, direct you to a booth, etc.
Poll watchers are expressly forbidden from doing any of those things. They are not paid by the government, and are typically volunteers. In my experience as a poll watcher they were typically representing a political party. In my case I was representing the Republican Party.
Any political party with at least one candidate on the ballot may send up to X watchers at any given time to a polling location and up to Y observers to the elections office where the ballots are counted. There are also specific procedures where representatives from the parties are allowed to test the machines that count the ballots. The parties inform the elections office who will be watching / observing when. A poll watcher / elections observer may not interfere with anything. If they observe blatant fraud they are to write down what they saw but they cannot interfere and can be expelled or even arrested for doing so.
In my case I was told I was absolutely not permitted to speak with anyone other than another elections observer or the Director of Elections, and then it had to be a whisper so that I would not disrupt the workers. The Director of Elections was very friendly and popped over every hour or so to ask if I had any questions. I could move around freely but could not stand in anyone’s way. Pre-Covid.
If you want to work the polls you sign up through your elections office. Many are desperate for more poll workers, but some locations are fully staffed and may not need additional workers. There’s only so much to do.
If you want to be a poll watcher or elections observer, talk to your local political party. Note that the level of the organization and of caring about watching is all over the map. When I was an observer there were precisely 0 Democrat observers. The Socialists had their allotted two observers in every time slot. For elections they obviously had absolutely no chance of winning. But no Democrats. The Republicans were in the middle: sometimes two observers, sometimes one, sometimes none. But in that particular county at that particular time, the Socialist Party was obviously the most organized. 
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I signed up to be a poll worker. They offer to pay, but since my employer will pay me I declined any compensation if they select me. I suppose I could have double-dipped! It required a fair amount of paperwork and it was like $120/day or something, eh.
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That sounds about right. It may vary, but I believe the $120 is exempt from FICA tax. (But not income tax.)
If they are short-handed it is definitely not too late to sign up. If they already have enough people then it might be.
Areas with a lot of seniors tend to do better as those folks are more likely to be willing & able to take a full day of their time (no job, no kids to take care of) that areas with few seniors.
I checked, and it’s too late. They did update their website to say this now “All applicants received will be advised of their status by October 24.” Perhaps they changed policy and now actually let everyone know their status.
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Yeah, you’re not going to convince me that we can’t get internet voting to be more fraud-proof than in-person voting.
That seems like an extremely easy thing to accomplish.
Sure we’ll just use whatever program we use for our unhackable bank accounts and unhackable computers.
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you’re right, let’s all walk because cars can break down.
Bitcoin FTW!
surely if we avoid internet voting we’d have no concerns about voting fraud!
Clearly blockchain and quantum computing is the answer here, the same as for any other technical challenge.
There is very little voter fraud with the current system, despite what conspiracy theorists want you to think.
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and there will be even less fraud in the internet system
Seems unlikely.
Got a message from google recently that some of the passwords that are stored there may be compromised (from a third party breech, not anything directly wrong with google). Luckily I don’t have many passwords stored there. One was for the AO.
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