A stunner

I'm back after an exhausting day yesterday working fifteen hours without a break as an inside poll observer, armed with a thick playbook and sworn to ferret out and report any voting irregularities, at a voting precincts in Newport News, 200 miles away.  Of fourteen precincts there, thirteen were manned by inside poll observers who were lawyers from Northern Virginia; ten of them, like mine, didn't have a single outside observer assigned to it by the democrats.

What, they don't have any lawyers down there in that hugely democratic district who are, or will admit to being, democrats and can act as their own locale's inside observers?  Our efforts might have helped to put the state into the blue column yesterday but it was a Pyrrhic victory for us thirteen who traveled down there at our own expense for our herculean day.  And you know how the day turned out, a stunning nationwide debacle.

Once I arrived at the polling place at 5:15 am to observe its set-up, I couldn't leave until the precinct announced its final tallies at around 8 pm, which were 635 votes for Clinton, 10 for Trump, 7 for Stein and 6 for the stoner Johnson.  I was working in the poorest part of town.

After giving us a training session, an admonishment to study our thick playbook long and hard, and a wish for good luck, the Virginia Democrats dispatched us thirteen inside observers from Arlington to the Hampton Roads area like we were top gun mercenaries.  I learned from the outside observer who came to collect our final numbers that she and the three other local workers were all headed to a Victory for Hillary party at a ballroom in Hampton to await results, to which we were not invited that I know of.

Probably for the best.  I felt used as I drove away to return home today, my exhausting effort having gone for naught with nary a thank you nor a follow up closing email from any of my numerous monitors in Arlington save for a curt "thanks" immediately following my text reporting the precinct's tallies once they were assembled.