…at 5 a.m. for the past week, ever since I had to last Tuesday.

That was Election Day around here, as you may recall. I was temping for King County Elections as a ballot tabulator.

I felt like a real big-city commuter, descending into the Bus Tunnel hours before dawn, clutching my traveling coffee mug like a security blanket. And this would be the day voters decided whether to become more of a big community, by moving further from the drudgery of the solitary commute toward the shared experience of public transit.

At least that’s how I interpreted the Roads-n’-Transit referendum. Yeah, it would add a lot of expensive, wasteful highway lanes. But it would also extend the fledgling light-rail line, perhaps from Lynnwood all the way to Tacoma. (I’d really like it to go from Tulalip to Olympia, plus branch lines along the 405 and 520 corridors. But the civic planning bureaucrats thought voters might prefer the healthy-but-unfamiliar taste of transit when mixed with the fatty-but-indulgent taste of roads. Who was I to argue?)

I was soon on bus route 174, the local to Sea-Tac, through the tunnel and the Sodo Busway, doglegging to Fourth Avenue South, then down the East Marginal Way industrial strip. It’s always been one of my favorite Metro runs. Especially during commuting hours. It’s a vehicle for working-class heroes and heroines on their way to Boeing, Jorgenson Steel, Associated Grocers, Costco, the Seattle Design Center, and assorted other living-wage employers. Along the way it passes such landmarks as Andy’s Diner, the born-again Christian vacuum cleaner store, the Western Bridge Gallery, the possibly soon-to-be-last Seattle Denny’s, and several surviving mom-and-pop motels.

My destination was a tired, sixties-era concrete office building on Boeing Field property, where King County had installed its Temporary Elections Annex (known internally as “The TEA”). I got off the bus one stop too far, requiring me to walk almost a quarter mile. They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn. This was an hour or two before the dawn and was plenty dark indeed, particularly with the low clouds and fog. Auto traffic was already getting heavy.

I entered the building, dropped my coat at the coat check, signed in on the sign-in sheets, picked up my temp ID necklace, and strolled into the Tabulation Room.

At 6:45 a.m., our supervisor (whom I’d previously met during a two-hour training session the previous week), gave us a short pep talk. Workers wheeled in steel carts bearing the courregated boxes containing vote-by-mail ballots. Promptly at 7, workers designated as “runners” handed some of the boxes to us.

In addition to the supervisor and four runners, there were political-party reps standing to one side, two computer operators (caged off from the rest of us behind outdoor chain-link fencing), and nearly 30 of us tabulators. This turned out to be far more than the job needed; I suspect administrators overhired because they wanted to test a ramping-up of the election procedures, in preparation for going to all-mail balloting.

Despite what you might have read on certain wingnut blogs in 2004, King County Elections runs a tight, efficient ship. Within one day of mailing out the ballots, they’d started to receive and process them. Every received ballot went through a series of steps in a series of rooms (opening, signature verification, checking for “overvote” errors, etc.) before it was boxed up and sent to tabulation. By law, tabulation could only occur on or after election day.

The tabulating process is a ritual in itself. First, I’d “break the seal” on the box (a plastic wristband-type device) with an envelope cutter. After double-checking various numbers written outside and on a slip inside the box, I ran the ballots (up to 300 per box) through the counting machine. (Yes, lefty conspiracy theorists, all the machines are from the dreaded Diebold Election Systems.)

It all output to a stack of server computers behind the fence. But the underlying technology is older than mainframes, going back to the punch cards that recorded the patterns for 19th century textile looms. King County’s machines now use optical scanning instead of punched “chads,” but the principle’s the same. A stack of cards gets run through a reading machine. The machine sees the proper marks in the proper places and sends word to add the proper digits to the proper tallies.

With such a major mechanical component to the process, there will, of course, be errant situations. Most of these involved faults with the mechanism that fed the ballots through the machine. These uncounted ballots were simply re-fed; the second run usually did the trick. Most boxes had one or two ballots with worse problems, including physical damage, that required them to be sent to the “dup” room (where staffers would duplicated their votes on fresh cards).

In 11 hours, as our supervisor told us the following day, my fellow tabulators and I processed more than 141,000 ballots. There was no real time to detect voting patterns; but I couldn’t help but notice that the ballots I got, which came from all over the county, expressed no great fondness for Roads-n’-Transit.

By the end of the work day, darkness had resumed outside. I had enough pep left to go drinking, at least briefly. That’s when I learned R n’ T was a goner, and with it immediate hopes for a comprehensive transport solution.

Then it was home, then to a quick bath and bed. Then it was a noise like the old Star Trek red alert sound. It was the new fire alarm in my building. Nothing threatening, just a kitchen fire on a lower floor; but it kept me outside in the cold for an hour.

Because of the relatively low voter turnout (do we still call it “turnout” after it does all absentee?) and the aforementioned overhiring of us temps, I had only 11 hours of further work over the rest of the week. The work I did get was calm, stress-free, rote procedural work, the sort of thing I tend to like.

Next year, the TEA will be replaced by an all-new ballot-processing facility in Renton. By next November, every ballot cast in the county will go through there, via the Postal Service (no more in-person polling places). Let’s hope it continues to go this smoothly.

And let’s hope I can learn to sleep in a little later.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, the more popular write-in candidate names I saw included Homer Simpson, Stephen Colbert, voters’ cats and dogs, and, in the Venus Velasquez race, “Ima Drunk.”