Recount captivity day 5

The best part about today is...I don't have to count any ballots tomorrow!! We start again on Monday. We finished the city of Oshkosh today and Monday we do the town of Algoma.

Today was very tense at times. In one of the wards, they were off by 100 ballots. They hauled yet another chairperson of a polling place into the firing squad and questioned her for at least a couple of hours. In the end, someone (and they're not telling who) wrote down the wrong number on one of the sheets they were keeping track on. They were never off by 100 ballots at all. I felt a little sorry for the woman they pulled in there. However, the rest of her stuff was kind of in a mess also. They also had to get the city's attorney in there as well, which was kind of a chore since the guy doesn't know how to use a cellphone.

Since a lot of the Republican campaign people were deer hunting, they had called in reinforcements to the ballot counting for their side. Unfortunately, one of the reinforcements was Gregg Underheim. Ugh. I got stuck sitting with him for at least an hour watching them feed ballots into a machine. Not fun. He was describing to me how he got tennis elbow in college playing foosball.

Paulette and the rest of our people were getting a kick out of watching the Repubs and their Blackberrys. When one of the guys phone rang this afternoon it was just really funny the way he whipped his phone out of the holster on his belt, kind of like the way they pull their guns out of a holster in those wild west movies.

At one other point in the afternoon, there was some question on what it said on two absentee envelopes. To some of the canvassers, it looked like it said "deceased" which was then crossed out. This of course started a whole bunch of funny jokes. The county clerk looked at it and said maybe the guy was Jesus. When one of us said maybe it was entered in error, one of the older ladies who was counting ballots wanted to know if his name was entered or interred, which made me almost fall off my chair laughing.

We'll see what kind of a mess the town of Algoma is in. Hopefully they have stuff straightened out since the last presidential election when people were in line until midnight to cast their ballot.

I have gotten pretty much knitting done this week while watching ballots run through the machine.