Enticed by the offer of a $100 stipend, I signed up a few weeks ago with the Registrar of Voters in Broward County to become a poll worker on election day. As a soon to be High school graduate working as a cafe barista in the local mall, I figured the experience would offer a good opportunity to earn some extra spending money. Of course, as I soon figured out, the stipend, spread out over 15 hours, amounts to less than the minimum wage. So my real motivation for working on election day would be to fulfill a sense of civic duty -- and simultaneously satisfy my curiosity about how the mechanics of a democracy really work, all the way down at the level of punch cards and chads. Despite lacking any prior election experience, I was assigned by the county registrar to the highest post there is: inspector. This meant that I was in charge of opening and closing the polls, managing three election clerks and arbitrating often-murky cases of voter eligibility. A few days before the vote, I attended a pre-election training class at University of Miami For an hour and a half, I listened to an energetic, spastic man speak to us about voting procedures. Like a motivational speaker, he circulated around the room with a wireless microphone and did his best to raise our level of enthusiasm. Thanks to him, I learned how to dislodge faulty punch-card ballots from voting machines -- but not much else. Many in the room appeared to be recently naturalized citizens with little grasp of English. An official Korean translator stood by to explain the main points of the class to a cluster of aspiring poll workers huddled in one part of the room. Supposedly, poll workers must meet three requirements to work on election day in Broward County: They must be citizens of the United States, registered voters and at least 18 years old. To my knowledge, none of these requirements was ever checked in my