Interviewee: Walter Ivanjack
Interviewer: Emily Kaufman
Location: Remote interview (Columbia, SC and Columbia, SC)
Date: September 28, 2020
Accession #: ELEC 004
Length of Recording: 75:06
Summary
Walter F. Ivanjack was born in October, 1943, and grew up in Chicago before attending the University of Illinois. Throughout his career, he served as a Career Army Officer in the Corps of Engineers before retiring to Columbia, SC with his wife.
In the interview Ivanjack reflects on the reasons motivating him and his wife to become poll managers, the best ways to address the need for more poll managers and the actions Ivanjack and his precinct are taking to inform voters and prepare for a successful election process on November 3rd. Ivanjack discusses challenges facing the 2020 election, such as COVID-19 increasing the use of mail in ballots, uniformed voters, increased bias and misinformation from media news sources and the increasing polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties. He shares the most significant problems currently facing the election process and identifies improvements that should be made to decrease voter suppression and create a successful election where every qualified voter is able to vote in a timely manner.
Keywords
Civic Engagement | Poll Manager | Voting | Voter Precincts | South Carolina Election | 2020 Presidential Election | Absentee Voting | Army Veterans
Recording
Transcript
Emily Kaufman: This is an oral history interview for the 2020 Election, Sharing Stories of Civic Engagement, Oral History Project, part of the coursework for honors college class SCHC 326 documenting the perspectives and experiences of those who are engaged in some way in the 2020 election. This is Emily Kaufman. The date is September 28th, 2020, and today I’m interviewing Walt Ivanjack remotely. I’m in Columbia, SC and Walt Ivanjack is in Columbia, SC.
Would you start by giving me your full name and spelling it?
Walter Ivanjack: Walter F, for Frances, Ivanjack I-V, as in Victor, -A-N-J-A-C-K.
EK: Where and when were you born?
WI: I was born in Chicago, IL in October 1943.
EK: Is that where you grew up, um, and what was the community like at that time?
WI: Yes, I grew up in Chicago, lived there until I, uh, that was my address, formal address until I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1966. And at that time, I entered the army as a Career Army Officer and served 27 years in the army, 27 plus years.
The community in Chicago that I lived in was an integrated community. I attended integrated public schools in Chicago, through high school. I attended the University of Illinois, then it was called the Navy Pier Campus, which is a two-year campus. Navy Pier, those who are familiar with Chicago, it’s a pier that extends out into Lake Michigan. I attended that for two years and then I had to finish my engineering classes at the Champaign Urbana campus and I graduated and was commissioned as a regular army officer in the Corps of Engineers at that time in 1966. Also coincident with that in February 1966 when I graduated, I, uh, got married and been married to the same woman (Coughs) for 54 years.
EK: What was the community like?
WI: The community was, uh, well we lived in the different communities throughout my life. My parents both worked. My father was drafted in the army during World War II and served in World War II in Europe. My parents, well, at times they owned a grocery store in my early years, which is a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, again an integrated neighborhood and not too far from downtown Chicago. In fact, when I visited there a few years ago, I could see what was then called the Sears tower from where my parents had their grocery store.
Then we moved and as I said, both my parents worked. Eventually when I graduated from school, by that time my father owned a trucking company, a two-truck trucking company. My father drove a truck, was a truck driver most of his life. My mother worked her life in administrative and clerical duties, on and off throughout her life. I had two sisters, both of them are deceased now, two older sisters. And as I said, we attended integrated schools, our high school was an integrated high school. So, we lived-in working-class neighborhoods.
EK: Thank you. Talk to me about your parents and grandparents.
WI: My grandparents, I did not know my grandparents on my father’s side, they were deceased by the time I was born. The only grandparent I really know well was on my mother’s side, my grandmother. My father’s side, my grandparents on my father’s side came from Croatia, so I claim a Croatian heritage. On my mother’s side, they came from Slovakia which back then, at various times in history is either part of Germany or a separate country, Czechoslovakia.
I did not know my grandmother very well. I remember visiting with my mother on Saturdays to see my grandmother. She was very elderly by the time I was a young man, so I did not know them.
My parents were both first generation Americans, working class Americans all their life. And I think that pretty much covers it.
EK: And what were their names?
WI: My father’s name was Walter; actually I learned later in life that his real first name was Valentine, but for some reason he didn’t like that name so he went by Walter, no middle name, Ivanjack. My mother was Susan Bajcar B-A-J-C-A-R was her maiden name.
Um, I learned also later in life that my parents married in 1930, so that was at the start of the early part of the depression. As I said my father drove a truck for most of his life. He was also a streetcar conductor at times. And I learned that as a young man, probably around 18 years old, he drove a beer truck for Al Capone.
EK: Wow!
WI: So, it doesn’t mean that he was a gangster. But you know, even though prohibition was on at the time people still drank beer and they had illicit beer distribution and he drove a truck to deliver the beer.
EK: Yeah, and what were your grandparents’ names?
WI: My grandmother remarried, her first husband died, and she remarried. Her name was Sopoci S-O-P-O-C-I.
My father’s side their last name, quite frankly, I don’t recall my grandfather on my father’s side. My father was one of five sons and their mother died and the father, I actually learned, again my father didn’t talk much about it, he did not have a good relationship apparently with his father. His father kicked the five boys out of the house and they pretty much lived on the street and were on their own from early in their life.
My mother, (phone rings at 8:53) my mother had a good life with her stepfather, she liked him very much, and with her mother. Yeah again, they were also working-class people.
EK: And then what were the family traditions you experienced?
WI: Well, we of course in Thanksgiving, we always got together in Thanksgiving. My mother’s side would get together either at my aunt’s house or they would come to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, same thing with Christmas time. We would have other relatives over to visit their house at Christmas time.
My father was raised in the Orthodox Catholic Church, although he did not religiously attend church. He married my mother who was a Lutheran and I was raised as a Lutheran. After I married my wife, after a few years I converted to Catholicism, Roman Catholicism.
EK: Um, do you carry any of the traditions forward, from your childhood?
WI: We carry the traditions of my wife’s family at Christmas time, we have a Christmas Eve dinner of fish and we have wafers that we share with each other. We break the wafer and dip it in honey and wish each other good wishes for the coming year.
EK: That’s awesome. Who had an influence on you?
(Disconnected at 10:35-10:38)
(Aside 10:38-10:41)
WI: Yeah, well, of course my father, he told me he thought I should go into the engineering field or some professional field. Both my parents, as I recall my parents did not graduate from high school. They were at work early in their lives so they didn’t have what we would call today a formal, traditional education through high school. So, they were working early in life, but my parents encouraged me to attend college, my father encouraged me to attend engineering.
I think the greatest influence I had was in high school ROTC. I was in our high school ROTC in Chicago and the NCOs there, I remember the most in terms of influencing me toward a military career and toward patriotism and serving the country.
EK: What is an NCO that you mentioned?
WI: Noncommissioned officer.
EK: OK.
WI: These were in the High School Reserve Officer Training School, which has been very strong in Chicago, I think it’s still strong today. High schools have ROTC training for young men that might be interested in a career in the military. Even if they’re not interested in careers, there’s a lot of benefits of the high school (Disconnected at 11:59 – 12:11) They were definitely retired but they serve the on the faculty at the high school and provide training in military science and tactics, drill and that type of thing.
EK: Awesome, thank you. OK, so why did you decide to volunteer as a poll manager?
WI: Well, of course my wife and I as we traveled throughout our military career, we were away from Chicago, which we kept as our as our legal residence. We always voted absentee because we felt it was our duty, the number one duty as an American citizen is to vote to keep our Democratic Republic strong and without that individual vote we don’t have much of a hope.
So initially when we moved to South Carolina we were both volunteers, we volunteered at the food bank for a few years and then recently in the 2016 election we became interested [in volunteering to be a poll manager], having experienced voting here. When we moved here to Columbia, we of course change our residence because this was going to be our permanent residence and we of course voted here. We saw very well-run voting precincts and not so well-run voting precincts and we thought this would be an opportunity again for us to serve.
Although we’re paid as poll managers, it’s not a lot of money. In fact, in terms of the number of hours you spend at the poll on voting day, it’s at least a 13 or 14-hour day and the amount of money that we’re paid is barely minimum wage. So, we don’t do it for the money, it’s more of a service function.
Plus, in the team that I work with we do a lot of extra time and put a lot of extra effort in making signs to guide the voters. So, it’s a service project on our part and without poll managers running a good election it can be discouraging to voters.
A properly run election should be run such that you minimize the waiting time, you minimize anything that would discourage a voter from coming out to vote. After all, we only vote every two or four years, or every two years. Most people are not political junkies, you know, they want to live their life, they want to enjoy life, they want to participate in sports or other activities, they want to participate in their family. They go to work, earn a living and they generally want to be left alone. But it’s still important for them to become, you know, to perform their duties as voters and we see it as our duty to help assist in running a fair and efficient election to encourage people to vote.
EK: And when you were saying you’ve seen well-run and not well-run voting precincts, was that in South Carolina or was that South Carolina and Chicago?
WI: No, in Chicago we were very young, I had just turned 20 years old when we left Chicago, or 22, and my wife was only 18, so we had just become new voters then. So, we voted by absentee ballot and receiving ballots you can’t imagine the length of the ballot. In Illinois, I don’t know if it’s changed now, but throughout the years they elect judges, so we would receive long lists of judges that we were supposed to vote for it. Of course, that’s kind of difficult when your absentee to decide which person, which judge, but of course then we had the presidential and the Senate and the Congress to vote. Our experience firsthand with voting has been principally here in South Carolina, where we actually go to a voting poll and vote.
I think this past June, its probably no secret that this past June’s primary election in the state, in Richland County was very problematic, mostly related to the COVID-19 problem of not being able to have enough places to hold the election. A lot of the churches and places outside the schools, which the schools are of course owned by the government and they can dictate “you can’t keep us out of the school to vote,” so they have to support us and they do, the schools do support us very well in running the election, but the churches were reluctant to have us come in. As I understand it, they sanitize their churches and their church meeting rooms against the COVID-19 and they did not want to bring a lot of public people in and then have to go through the re-sanitation, so that was one reason was not having enough polling places.
The second reason was poll managers were reluctant to come out and expose themselves to the public, so there was a shortage of poll managers. So, they had to combine precincts and instead of combining precincts there were actually co-located precincts. In our case, at North Springs Elementary School, we had instead of the normal 2000 or 2900 registered voters, we had over 7000 voters come into that location. We had three combined, or I should say, co-located precincts, North Springs 2, Parkway 1 and Parkway 3. Although we were provided enough ballot marking devices, we did only have four electronic voter registrations, the laptop computer with the electronic registration. It takes at least 60 seconds to in process a voter and get him to the machine, so you can do the math, its 60 seconds that’s 3 voters per minute you process and when you’ve got a couple hundred voters in line, its a long waiting line. It was a long day, we opened up the polls at 7:00 AM and we really didn’t close our poll until well after 10:00 at night. The polls closed, because by law you have to close the poll at 7:00 PM, but anybody in line, still in line at 7:00 PM could vote and we didn’t process our last voter until after 10:00 PM.
That election they didn’t anticipate what the problems were and didn’t prepare for those problems. We did our best, our North Springs 2 team, did an excellent job through signage, through direction but there were still confused voters as to where they were supposed to come to vote.
EK: Gotcha, do you feel like taking what happened for the primaries that during the general election it will go better in November?
WI: So far, I attend, by Zoom, I attend the voter registration board’s meetings, actually starting this Thursday they’ll be having meetings every Thursday by Zoom up until election time, and it looks like they’ve got the number of polling places locked in and they’re going to have enough poll managers to manage the election. I don’t know whether we’re going to have enough electronic voting desks. That’s the bottleneck, the electronic voting registration, the laptops where you have to process the voter in, in order to put them on a machine so they can do their voting. That is truly the bottleneck is processing them. So that’s the only question I have, whether we’re going to have enough electronic voter registration.
We’re preparing now, my team leader is Rebecca, and we’ve been preparing signage so that as people arrive at North Springs 2, for now we’re only going to have only North Springs 2 at our location, it doesn’t look like they’re going to have to combine precincts this time, so we’ll have enough signage making sure they understand where they’re at and that this is North Springs 2. We’ll have information available to get them in line. Also, we’re playing to the voter that’s not sure if they’re in the right place by having signage that asks them the question, “Are you in the right place to vote?”.
One of the greatest assets that is available is the South Carolina voting website, scvotes.gov, and on that site a voter can go there and do all kinds of things with regard to his voter registration, they can look up their voter registration, they could find the name of the precinct they’re assigned to, they can find the physical address of where that is located. If they are aware of that, they can find what is the right place for him to go vote. Or if they want to vote by absentee ballot, it has a link for them to apply for an absentee ballot. It also has a link, it’s available now because we just finished the special primary for County Council 9, it has a link where they can pull up what’s called the sample ballot. The reason they call it a sample ballot is to avoid confusion, at least as I understand it, if they said this is your ballot, people would think they’re supposed to vote that. It’s a sample ballot, sample in the sense that this is what they’re going to see when they come to vote, so that’s available now by online. There’s a wealth of information, you know, today’s age of the Internet. If people are savvy, they can find where to vote, when to vote. I think most people, even those people that don’t have a home computer, if they have access to a cell phone or know somebody that’s got a cell phone or computer or they go to the library, they can access scvotes.gov.
Unfortunately, I really believe the broadcast media could do a better job of providing information to people to find out the things they need to do to be ready to vote on November 3rd. Plus, the county will have opened six, what they call, satellite sites since they passed the law a couple weeks ago and was signed by the governor, that they’ve made absentee voting available for everyone. The law was that you had to have a valid reason not to vote in person, such as being away, being elderly, or various reasons or being a poll manager where you couldn’t vote at your normal precinct on voting day, but now they’ve made absentee voting available for everyone without regard to qualification. That allows you to vote by US Mail or, I would call more preferably if you want to vote ahead of November 3rd, starting on October 7th, they have five locations starting October 5th, what they call satellite locations where a person can go in and vote in person as if it were November 3rd. Those are available and those again are available on online.
EK: OK. What type of training do you have to go through to become a poll manager?
WI: There’s a Poll Manager’s Handbook which the state puts out and it’s a detailed handbook that covers everything literally from soup to nuts of how to set up a polling place, how to process the voter, how to handle problems such as if a person shows up at the wrong location or their registration isn’t quite in order, there’s ways to allow them to vote, what they call a paper ballot. They have various ways to help out the voter who might have a problem with their registration, so that’s the Poll Manager’s Handbook.
Plus we have to attend, if you’re a poll manager for the first time you have to attend in person training and then subsequent to that you have the option of in person training or doing your training online. The South Carolina Election Commission has a detailed training place online you can go and it’s a video, you have to complete the course in various subsets and you also have to take a written test, so that’s the training. In addition, since we’ve had the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve added on to that COVID-19 training, which covers the aspects of wearing the mask, setting up sneeze guards or barriers, how to sanitize the equipment, how to sanitize the pens, the various things that you need to do, the social distancing that you have to mark out in the precinct area, so that’s additional training has been added for COVID-19. Every election, no matter whether you’re an experienced poll manager whose run elections before, I believe it’s within 30 days of any election you have to complete that training again, kind of like a refresher training.
We are paid for the time to do the training and then of course we’re paid for our work on the day of the election. The day of election it is a challenge, we have to be there at 6:00 in the morning and get everything set up and get the machines open and operating and then the polls open promptly at 7:00 AM. We promptly close them at 7:00 PM, anybody still in line at 7:00 PM gets to vote, of course, but it turns out to be, with the prep time and the shutdown time, a minimum of a 13 to 14 hour day.
EK: How does the training in South Carolina compare to training in other states?
WI: I don’t know about other training and other states, I haven’t worked as a poll manager in other states, so I can’t compare.
One thing I’ll say, in the electronics age, the new ballot marking devices we have, compared to the old voting equipment that we had in previous elections, its light years ahead of what we have previously. It gives the voter the opportunity to very easily and officially mark their ballot and basically not record the ballot but prepare a ballot. Its called a ballot marking device, its an electronic device you put in a blank ballot, the voter marks his choices and then it puts out the ballot with his choices on there, both in written in names, such as the name of each person you voted for the different offices, and also it has a barcode. That gives the voter a chance to read that ballot and verify that it recorded his vote as he intended and then he takes that over to a scanning machine. At that point, the ballot is scanned and recorded, that now becomes the official vote and at the same time that paper ballot is dropped into a secured ballot box underneath the scanning machine. You now have a paper back up to the vote so if there’s any question of the vote you can always go back and count those paper ballots, that’s head and shoulders above what we had previously, a very efficient system.
There was some confusion at first, people thought when that ballot got kicked out that that was their receipt to vote but we had to explain to them, that is actually your ballot. It avoids the hanging chad business, it avoids any question and helps the voter get a sense that his vote has been recorded as he intended. Under the old system, you marked the electronic screen, you marked that screen and then you recorded your vote and that was it, you didn’t have any record to really look at to verify and so you counted on the fact that as you mark the screen and what appeared on the screen is how your vote is recorded. Now you actually have a paper ballot to verify what you’ve done and then of course that becomes your vote.
EK: Do you know if these machines are being used across all of the US, or is this state by state?
WI: I know for a fact they’re not used because we have some friends who live in Omaha, NE and we were just talking to them on Sunday and we told them what we had here, they live in an area outside of Omaha and they still have the hand marked paper ballots.
EK: Oh wow!
WI: I’m sure that’s not unique, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a variation, although the machines we have are available, just a matter of whether or not local governments want to pay the money for them.
EK: OK, do you know if they’re being used across all of South Carolina, or is it just in Richland County?
WI: The ballot marking devices are a statewide piece of equipment. I know from the training, the training book, The Poll Manager’s Handbook, is published by the South Carolina Election Commission and the training online, South Carolina prepares the training online, so that is standardized training across the state.
EK: OK, gotcha.
WI: That tells me that across the state these ballot marking devices and the scanning is statewide.
EK: Thank you. How do you think the need for more Americans to volunteer as poll managers can best be handled?
WI: Well, we became interested in poll managers by our experience, having gone to the poll and seeing the people there helping us to vote. We didn’t see any advertising or any requests out there, I believe, in my opinion, a better job could be done and it has to be done well in advance of the election. A year before any election they need to start recruiting people to poll manage. The majority of the people we work with are retired people, that’s my experience, they’re retired, they’re certainly in their 50s and 60s. My wife and I are in our 70s so we’re retired people, some people would say (Laughs) we’re elderly, but there’s plenty of people out there that I think if they were made aware of the need for poll managers they would do it. It’s something that not everybody can do, as I said, it’s a 14 hour day, once you report for duty at the poll you have to stay there, we’re not allowed to go home or go off and have lunch, you bring your lunch. In our case our clerk, who’s our senior poll manager, provides lunch and dinner for us, she makes it and brings it to the polling place, she basically feeds us, it’s another incentive for people to want to be on her team.
So, I think they can do a better job, back to your question, I think they can do a better job of advertising the need for poll managers and they need to tell them upfront what’s required, because you wouldn’t want somebody to be surprised (Laughs) of the demands of the job without being advised ahead of time. So, they could do a better job of advertising because from time to time people, for various reasons, won’t be able to do the job or won’t want to do the job, so you’re always in need for new poll managers.
Let’s face it, the starting point for voting is its really an engineering operations systems research job task. It’s simple math, you start out with you know how many registered voters you have in a county. The question you start with is, how long do you want a voter to have to wait in line to vote. So, when you start with that and given the number of voters, of course you have registered voters, not everybody’s going to show up, some of them are going to vote absentee, some just won’t show up. Although in recent years I think more and more people are interested in seeing the need to vote, which is good. You have from historical context how many you could expect to show up at that particular poll and then you need to divide that by geography, so people don’t have too far to go, you have to make sure you have parking and adequate space, but the first thing is how long should a voter have to wait in line to vote? Unfortunately our voting in this country is on a regular business day, some countries as I understand it, they do it on the weekend like on a Saturday or in some places on a Sunday where people are generally off from working and don’t have to worry about missing work. So, you start with that number of how many, is it 30 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour? They talk about the Department of Motor Vehicles, if you went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and had to wait three or four hours to do your job of getting your driver’s license or whatever related thing you would do at the department, if you had to wait that long, it would be very discouraging, and in a lot of cases you can’t do that absentee. That’s kind of a model to use of how many clerks do you need to serve people going to the Department of Motor Vehicles. You start out with, what is it 30 minutes, what’s a reasonable time to wait to vote and then you divide that group of voters up that you expect to show up into precincts, which is voting locations, and then you provide the equipment and people to handle that group of people there. It’s not rocket science and not brain surgery, it’s a simple thing to manage.
They say a member of congress as soon as he’s elected to congress, we lived in the Washington, DC area, so we know this first hand, they tell a congressman the very first job he has after being elected to Congress, has to start planning for the next election in 2 years to be reelected. Well, that’s the same thing they should be doing with our voting, as soon as we finish this November 3rd general election, they need to start planning for the next midterm election 2 years from now, in terms of buying, getting equipment, recruiting poll managers, making sure they have locations locked down as to the number of precincts and the adequate number of precincts spread out throughout the county and make sure that those places have sufficient parking. In June, with 7000 registered voters to vote at our one location, we ran out of parking space. We had cars waiting in line to come in, so they had to wait in line in their car to find a parking space and then once they parked, they had to wait in line again to vote, so you were talking about several hours.
People raise the issue of voter suppression and it may not be by intent, but in fact, the end result is that can be looked at as being voter suppression when you make it tedious, time consuming and very long process to get your vote in. That shouldn’t be allowed, there’s ways of planning and organizing against that outcome.
EK: Yeah. What do you believe are the duties of a US citizen in the voting process?
WI: The duty of the citizen, first of all to stay informed. Of course, us voting absentee in the Chicago area, in Illinois elections, that of course was quite difficult for some of the offices like the judgeships. When you’re residing in a fixed place and that’s where you’re going to vote, the duty is to stay informed as to what the issues are, what are the candidates’ intent, are they qualified in a first step with the proper education background and life experience to do a good job, are they physically capable of doing the job and what is their philosophy.
First of all, being informed as a voter and then secondly knowing where and when to vote, which unfortunately there’s a lot of people that wait until the last minute and they come to the place that they voted [previously]. I know this November we will have people coming to our precinct because they voted there in June because we had three combined precincts, they’re going to think, unless they check and verify it, they’re going to show up at our precinct because they said, “well, that’s where I voted last time.” That’s because your precinct was located with us last time, this time your precinct is going to be at its normal place. They have to be aware of that and that’s why a lot of our signage is oriented towards those people asking them. We’re going to do what we call Burma Shave signs. Do you know what a Burma Shave sign is?
EK: No.
WI: Up on the roads, particularly roads in North Dakota and Montana, they have what they call Burma Shave signs. As you travel, you’re driving a car along the road, they would have messages in short sentences or phrases that you could read as you’re driving 60 miles per hour with a little advertising message for Burma Shave. They were kind of cutesy and interesting. We’re going to have those types of signs set up so as the voter is standing in line, the first sign they’ll see will say: “Are you in the right place to vote today?”, second sign will be: “Voting places have changed since June”, third, for our place it will be: “North Springs Two is voting here today, if you need help, ask a poll manager or go to scvotes.gov”.
Since we’re at a school, the advantage of all the schools, I believe its true, all the schools in Richland County have public access Wi-Fi, so if you’ve got a cell phone, you can go on your cell phone. We’ve done that, last week when we were doing the runoff election and prior to that, if a person showed up and said, “well, am I supposed to vote today?”, all we have to do is ask them their first name, last name and date of birth and we could bring up their registration and tell them, “you’re in County Council 9, yes, you’re voting here today and this is your precinct” or “no, you’re County Council 8 you don’t vote today.” We can do that and we did that in in the June primary. We can do that as people are lined up, we can say, “Are you sure? Do you know that you’re supposed to vote here today?” If not, we can find out before they wait an hour or two hours to come up to be in processed to find out, “No, (Laughs) you don’t vote here”.
Unfortunately, in June with all the effort we did to try and make sure they’re in the right place, we had a couple people come up and literally at 6:30 PM or 7:00 PM or after the polls close at 7:00 PM and then we said “you’re in the wrong place, you were supposed to go over to such and such place” and at that time if they were there after seven they couldn’t vote that day. So, they were very angry and understandably, but again, it’s a matter of going back to the question, what’s the duty of a voter in addition to staying informed about who and why you’re voting as to where you’re voting.
EK: Yeah, so will there be someone standing outside before they’re getting in line who are helping them?
WI: Yes, when you visited us the other day, you notice we had a little tent. By the way, that canopy our senior poll manager, Rebecca Woodford, or what they call the clerk, she’s a senior poll manager, she’s in charge of us, she bought that canopy on her own to give protection to what we call the outside or curbside poll manager. When you pulled up, that’s what I was doing at that particular time. That will have signs pointing as they approach, come into the North Springs 2 area, and it would be nice if all the precinct did that, you know, “vote this way”, “vote North Springs 2” and then they’ll see a sign that says “information tent ahead” and then at the information tent, I’ll be doing the outside this time with another fellow, we’ll have two people and it’ll be an information tent and if people have a question or want to know how to vote curbside, they’ll be able to stop and we’ll verify at that time, you know for sure that this is where you’re supposed to vote. If they’re not sure or if they’re uncertain, we can check on our cell phone or iPad, we can verify “Yeah, you’re in the right place” and then they go park. As their walking in line, if they haven’t stopped to talk with us, we get them again by looking at those Burma Shave signs to raise the question with them, “Are you in the right place to vote?”.
We always have had an outside poll manager to help and guide people to answer questions and for those who are eligible to vote curbside. Curbside voters, if you’re over 65 you can vote curbside or if you have a handicap you can vote curbside. I think the over 65 is little excess, quite frankly, because I’m 76 and I get to carry
(Laughter)
the voting machine up to the curb. So, if I’m 76, I think the average 65 person, unless they do have a disability should come on in the vote. Anyway, if they are eligible to vote curbside, we will bring the machine out to the curb and they can vote while they’re in their car. That doesn’t give them the opportunity or the option of jumping the line, they’ll have to wait, maybe have a waiting time that’s parallel or consistent with the person that’s standing in line. Whatever person shows up the stand in at the end of the line waiting to walk in, the curbside voter who arrived at the same time will have the same waiting time as that person. We have a way of tracking that so that its not an incentive to go curbside because you’re going to jump the line or as we would call as kids butt in line.
EK: Has curbside voting always been available or is that new?
WI: As far as I know it’s always been available, for the elections I’ve worked it’s been available. Our first election that we worked was 2016 and every election its been available, I’m sure since we before that.
WI: By the way, in June we had over 100 curbside voters.
EK: Wow!
WI: On that day in June, that was a hot day to be carrying [the ballot marking device], well, I had you pick up that machine, remember. There’s a battery inside, so that battery makes that machine very heavy. Fortunately, we’re supposed to have a cart, they’ve purchased and they haven’t arrived yet, as far as I know, I’ll find out Thursday. They have a cart that’s made to mount that machine on a wheel cart so almost anybody could wield that cart out to the car.
EK: But you had to carry it 100 separate times?
WI: Yes.
EK: Wow, that’s a lot.
WI: Yes.
(Laughter)
EK: What are the duties of not only news outlets but also voter registration and election officials to inform citizens about the voting process? I know you had [touched] on this earlier, but if you have anything to add.
WI: I’ll be happy to repeat it, certainly, it’s the duty of the voter registration board to not only to register voters, but to make sure the information because they’re the ones that set up the voting places in each county. They’re the ones that are the first line of information and authority for setting up precinct locations, dividing up the number of voters by precinct by location. They’re the ones that have the information, they need to get that information out to the voter, either directly through mail. If they change a voter’s registration location numbers and they say, “you’re no longer going to vote where you voted last year, we’re changing your precinct location”, you have a duty to mail that directly to that voter at their mailing address.
Unfortunately, not all voters keep that information up to date. Voters move and they won’t remember to change their registration, I’ll go back to it in a minute because that’s an important point as far as the voter responsibility. First of all, it’s a duty directly from the voter registration board to inform the voter where they’re supposed to vote, and it’s also their duty to go through the media, the printed media and the broadcast media, to get that information out in a timely manner. With the internet, what I call push information, where they (Disconnected at 47:12 – 47:15) totally savvy on sending information out by the internet, but they could do advertising on the internet. Because I see people all the time, I go to the gym on a regular basis, in between repetitions I see, particularly young people, are on their cell phones so people are on their cell phone constantly, they’re on the internet constantly; there’s a way to get word out through the internet. Through the print media as well as, particularly, the broadcast media, radio and TV, they should be sending that information out, if not detailed information at least tell them about things like scvotes.gov and how to verify they’re at the right place. That’s their duty.
I think it’s the media not to wait for the information be pushed to them, but the media if they’re doing their job right, of informing people, they should be going to the voter registration board and getting that information and pushing it out. The morning news programs, at the least, they can be telling people, either by the crawler or by the announcer, the news anchors, informing people of resources where to find this information.
Now let me go back to another duty of the voter, when the voter moves and changes their address or their physical location, they need to go back and change that under voter registration. That can be a problem, if a person moves within the same precinct, that won’t be a problem for them to vote, but if they change their location, say they move outside the county 30 days before an election, they may not be able to vote because they haven’t changed their registration. There’s certain deadlines as to be properly registered and have your registration up-to-date before an election. We’ve had that problem where people show up and they’re at the wrong place because they don’t live where they were registered.
EK: Gotcha, thank you. I guess adding on to what you were talking about, what type of impact do you think that many [of] the news media sources as well as what the rise of social media has had on properly informing Americans to cast educated votes?
WI: I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there and unfortunately I believe, again I’m getting into the politics of it, I think today’s – at one time in this country the news media was given a special position what they call the fifth state, or is it the fourth state, they have a special duty under the Constitution, under our government, to impartially inform people, keep informed about what their government is doing, what their politicians are doing. They had a duty to do that impartially.
Now a newspaper, when the newspapers were the main source of information, today your cable and broadcast channels have that duty, they also do have an opinion responsibility. So, on the opinion page of newspapers, that’s where the newspapers used to record their views, their opinion views, their partisan view on a particular candidate and they would endorse candidates. But, when they’re supposed to be in just strictly news, they’re supposed to tell the who, what, when, where, and why of what actually happened and let the person make the judgment based on the accurate reporting. I don’t think we have that anymore, I think the adversarial, the agenda of news media has flowed into the reporting so you don’t get honest reporting, you get the agenda, both left and right, of the media, as to what agenda they’re pushing rather than honestly reporting the facts of the who, what, when, where, why and let the people judge for themselves. You look at our own state newspaper, that’s degenerated into (Laughs) a newsletter, as I would call it, there’s not much to that anymore. From what I understand, they don’t have the subscriptions, people rely on the broadcast media, particularly cable TV, to get their information. I think we have to find some way of getting back to our media, broadcast media as well as the social media they can have the opinion side, the editorial side but they also have a responsibility of letting all voices be heard. If they want to get into the reporting side of it, reporting honestly and accurately and not letting the opinion side flow into the news side.
EK: What do you feel are the most pressing issues in this election?
WI: Well, it seems to me that the Democrat Party, I hear this from Democrat friends, the Democrat Party is no longer the Democrat Party of my father or my grandfather. The Democrat Party was equally pro-American, pro-constitution, pro-America as was the Republican Party, the difference between them of how to achieve what we wanted to achieve as a country. Now we have a very far left agenda in the Democrat side that is bordering on socialism, and that’s not what our country is founded on. Equal time on the right, you do have the far right that wants to put certain religious tenants into, or at least to they’re blamed for putting religious dogma into the politics, so you have both sides in that regard of the far left and far right. So, somehow we’ve got to get back to having two parties that are interested in America being the stronger [country].
You hear people say that America is great, they don’t mean the American people are any smarter or any harder working, my wife and I have lived overseas and of course a lot of our ancestors came from overseas, so American people aren’t any smarter any more hardworking, any more well educated than the average citizen in Germany or other European countries or elsewhere, for that matter. What makes our country different is our form of government, it’s a government of the people, the government is ruled by the consent of the people and unfortunately in history, if you look at even Britain today, you don’t have the rights and privileges in Great Britain, where we came out of initially, that American citizens have. When I meet people who have immigrated to this country and they’ve come from socialist, communist countries or even from Great Britain when they come here they say, “I came here because of the freedoms and opportunities under your form of government and I don’t want to see you ruin that because I won’t have any place else in the world to go.”
EK: Yeah. This has come up in the news, but in your experience, working as a poll manager in 2016 as well as the primaries in June and then preparing for the general election, where this year there’s going to be a much greater use of mail in ballots due to COVID-19. How likely do you think the authenticity of this election could be affected by voter fraud?
WI: That is a challenge, the mail in or the classic absentee ballot system that is through the US Postal Service, that system there’s a fundamental there of verifying that the person that is sending that ballot in is a properly registered and authorized voter. Let me give you an example, when a person comes to us at a polling place, we have to have a picture ID, it has to be a current picture ID, it could be a South Carolina driver’s license but if it’s out of date it’s not acceptable, so it has to be a current South Carolina driver’s license, a current government issued ID, such as military ID, or even a US passport. So we have to verify who they are, once we know that person standing in front of us is who they report to be then we see if they’re registered and qualified to vote. Now on absentee ballots, the absentee ballot should only go out to a person that is a registered, qualified voter and when it comes back, there has to be safeguards to make sure it came back from that qualified, registered voter in a timely manner. There are reports, instances of where the ballot either doesn’t get back or they just had a recent news item of having ballots found in some storage space or some postal worker has taken the ballots home for some reason or just recently found them in a ditch, I think it was in Pennsylvania, several ballots. Those votes from authorized voters didn’t get the count, the mail in system is problematic that it has to be run properly.
As I said, I’m originally from Chicago and Chicago is notorious, has been for years, for you vote early and vote often and voting the graveyard, in other words, people that die but don’t get taken off the ballot. How’s that possible? It’s possible and this is documented by your political science folks at your college, you can ask them to verify this, in the 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon, Illinois was one of those states to tip the balance in favor of Kennedy, it was a very close election, and the way they do it in Cook County Chicago, the way I’ve learned it through my political science courses, is that in Cook County, Chicago you look to see how many people have voted and how many you need for your democrat candidate and then you go and vote those votes that haven’t shown up. In other words, you have people on the voter registration list and you know they’re not going to show up because they’re dead so you go ahead and vote their vote to make sure you have enough votes to elect your democratic candidate, I say democrat because Chicago’s been under democratic control for decades, before I was born. So, that’s how notorious Chicago is. That’s starting with not just absentee voting, but voting in general, the registration lists have to be accurate up-to-date, only people who are registered, qualified citizens are on the list and they’re alive.
(Laughter)
So you start with that and absentee voting should not be a problem as long as the post office mail the ballots out in time and you tell them when they got to get them back in time, that should be able to be done. That’s a lot of things that have to be done to make the absentee work. Now, here in South Carolina, because we’re going to be able to vote early in person, that relieves the need to have everybody show up on November 3rd. You got almost a whole month, actually starting on October 5th at 2020 Hampton Street you can start then on October 5th and then two days later, October 7th there’s five other places and those places will be open until November 2nd, the day before voting, and a person could go vote there early and vote absentee in person. They will be processed as if they were showing up on November 3rd, they’ll verify who they are, that they’re a qualified voter and they’ll be able to vote so that eliminates the need for the mail in ballots here in South Carolina, I don’t know how many other states are doing that.
Yes, the absentee voting is problematic. As I’ve read, in some states they’re just mailing out without [absentee ballot request]. A person should request the absentee ballot, the voter should request it before you send it to him but some states, they’re blanket mailing them out. When you have all those going out, how do you keep track that they got to the right person that’s qualified to vote that and that it gets sent back? That has to be watched for and safeguarded against.
EK: How do they go about making sure to remove people who have died since the last election?
WI: Well to be honest, I don’t know how they do that. I know if a person doesn’t show up for several elections, I forget how many years it is, they don’t necessarily get removed from the voter registration list that they get into another list. Say we have an election, that person shows up and they haven’t voted it like in 10 years or 15 years, I forget what the number is, they might not show up on EVARL and they might say, “I voted, its been a long time,” we can call downtown to 2020 Hampton and they can pull up the record and say, “Oh yeah, they just haven’t voted. They’re good to vote, they’re still qualified, they’re still registered. Go ahead and let them vote.”
It depends on groups like Judicial Watch and other voter watchdog groups that go to the states and by looking at the social security. When a person dies, typically they’re an older person their social security, I don’t know if it’s the county corner or who is responsible saying, “this person has died” and then it gets into the general government system, Social Security says, “don’t be sending the checks out anymore.” I don’t know for sure, but that’s got to be one place where the voter registration people can check the Social Security system to see if there’s been a death. Even online, you can go online and you put a person’s name online, I’ve done this for myself, you can find out whether I’m alive or dead (Laughs) online. So there’s ways, if the voter registration board is serious about their job, there’s ways of tracking that information and making sure that only the living are on the list.
EK: (Laughs) Gotcha, that makes sense. As a veteran and considering the recent open letter that hundreds of retired military Generals and Admirals signed expressing support for Biden, how is your stance on this election been influenced by your service perspective?
WI: Not at all, first of all, I haven’t seen the letter published, though I’ve heard about it and I’ve been meaning to look to see who is it on this letter. I served my last seven years in the Army in the Pentagon.
EK: Oh wow.
WI: The job I had was working for the Chief of Staff of the Army on his duties in the Joint Arena. The Chief of Staff of the Army has the duties for the Army but also the Chiefs of Services get together as the Joint Chiefs of Staff to decide those defense things that go across all the Services. So, I had a portfolio of duties to serve him and I had arms control, nuclear, biological weapons, engineering stuff, those were the things that were in my portfolio to oversee to help prepare him for his job. So, I’ve known and I’ve met Generals and Admirals, they’re supposed to be apolitical while they’re serving in their job but a lot of them do have their own political agenda and I’m not surprised to see them.
My question is, why did they say that President Trump’s unfit? Is it because he’s not willing to fight these endless wars? I think President Trump is reading the American people, at least he’s reading me. I have a son who served in the military, he’s retired as well, and he was in Afghanistan and Iraq twice. How many years do we have to fight those wars, to send people in harm’s way, for what purpose? So, I think the American people, as a group, are tired of getting involved in Afghanistan and Iraq and I think President Trump’s reading that we need to bring them back home and there’s other ways to defend the country without having to be fighting endlessly.
I don’t doubt that there’s some Admirals and Generals that think that’s wrong and they disagree, but they’re not the President and they’re not the American people. The President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, he sets our policy, both our State Department and our defense policy, and if they don’t like it, they can leave the service. From what I understand, all these Generals and Admirals, and I guess there are some State Department people thrown in there, that all are retired or not really in active service.
Now, one of my experiences in the Pentagon, in attending the National War College, is the State Department has a lot of people in it. In the State Department you have people that sit on, what they call, desks, in other words, there’s somebody, let’s say Germany, he has what they call a desk, meaning he has the portfolio for Germany. He’s supposed to be the Germany expert. Well, those people, I’ve met a lot of them that instead of looking after the interests of the United States, they’re looking after the interests of their desk country. In other words they’re almost like they’re representing Germany rather than representing the United States with regard to German interests. There’s a story, when I was in the Washington, DC area, I met a lot of people that have said one of the things that when a new president comes in, a new administration comes in, he thinks he’s in charge of the State Department, but it’s the career employees that are really in charge of State Department. Trying to move that ship of the State Department in a different direction or getting to follow the policies of the administrations in power sometimes is quite hard, even though the President appoints the Secretary of State, he may not necessarily in charge of what’s going on.
EK: OK. Gotcha. And then I just have one more question before letting you make any closing remarks you would like. But what influenced you to become more civically engaged?
WI: I think what was going on in the country and where the country was headed, I know during the 2016 election I was not alone in that regard. As poll managers we all kind of rotate and do different jobs and in addition to being the guy that would maybe take the ballot marking device out to the curb, because I was the biggest, strongest person there, (Laughs) I would also do in processing to give a person that was working on the on the laptops a break or to go eat lunch or something. In the 2016 election I had people come up to me and say, “This is the first time I’ve voted in my life.” We were not talking about young people, we were talking about people in their 40s and 50s. I had people say, “Gee, I haven’t voted in a presidential election in decades.” So, there truly was a movement of the American people saying we need to change course here.
Truly, when you look at President Trump, whether you like him or hate him, he has upset the apple cart for the politicians in the Republican and the Democrat Party because, let’s face it, to become president typically since the 20th century, you were either a senator, a governor of a state or a very famous, popular military officer. Even a congressman, it would be very difficult for a congressman to run for the presidency because he hasn’t met what the politicians consider all the [requirements], he hasn’t done his job, he hasn’t paid the price. So, when a guy like Trump who’s never been in political office, he’s been a businessman all his life, decides to get jump into the election there were people saying that he really wasn’t going to run, he wasn’t serious about it. I think that was wishful thinking because he’s basically changed the course now that says you don’t have to be a governor, you don’t have to be a senator, you just have to be somebody that cares about the country and cares about the direction. I think that’s his philosophy as a businessman. He said this before he got into the election, over the years, if you look at when he was interviewed as a young man, he had said early on in life, “I don’t like how they do things in Washington” and I don’t know if it was him or somebody termed “the swamp.”
I think along those lines, plus from my personal perspective, if you look at the so called “swamp,” that is the career political and government employees in Washington, DC that are year after year after year. There are two things in recent times they’ve done that they should be ashamed of, one of them is the Vietnam War. Whether or not we should have got into the Vietnam War you could argue all day long, but once you got into it you need to stick it out until it was a successful outcome. The Vietnam War, we sent 57,000 young men and some young women to their death, crippled a lot of others, even some today are dying from their Vietnam experience because of Agent Orange and other things that happened to them has shortened their life. So, the politicians in Washington said, “We need to fight this war and then in the end said oh, never mind it wasn’t that important” and now Vietnam is one of our trading partners. That’s one thing about the swamp that I say it did to us, the other thing is 9/11. I’m not saying 9/11 was done by the swamp, I think from my experience of all the money we spend on intelligence and defense things, 9/11 shouldn’t have happened. We should have been able to detect it and prevent it before it happened, that’s another failure of the way things operate in Washington.
Those things cause me and my wife to become more concerned and more involved in the process and we’re not the type of people that get involved with supporting, doing individual things or working for a particular candidate, I tried that once and it wasn’t much fun making phone calls for candidates. You have to be a special person to want to call up people and make cold calls
could be involved in making sure that the process assists people, I’ll read it to you because I have a hard time remembering it, the Poll Manager’s Creed is “I will do all I can within the law to help you vote today.” So that’s what we do as poll managers to help them to accomplish their citizen duties and as long as we’re able and healthy to do it, we intend to do that.
EK: Awesome, thank you! Do you have anything else you would like to add?
WI: No, I think I covered it all.
(Laughter)
As I said, we’re already preparing for, right after we finished last week’s special primary for County Council 9, Rebecca, my lead poll manager, and I have been talking about things we can do to make sure we have a successful November 3rd election. I’ll be working at one of the satellites for the month of October, I expect to be working Monday through Friday every day in October. I’m looking forward to that and as I said, we’re getting ready for November 3rd at North Springs 2 and I hope all the other precinct poll managers, certainly their clerks are looking ahead to that to make it a very successful election, successful in the sense that everybody that wants to vote can vote in a timely manner.
EK: Awesome, thank you so much for your time and thank you for your service.
WI: Thank you, thank you. I enjoyed meeting you, I’ve enjoyed this!
EK: I did too!
End of interview