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Thoughts from an Election Official I was manning one of the polling stations yesterday, and I got a lot of questions from friends so I thought you guys would be interested too. First - none of us volunteered, we were simply assigned. You can get out of it only if you're pregnant, or if you are on MC (whether keng or real). We get paid ~$250-300, which sounds great, but the hours are terrible. To earn this money you need to: do a 1-2h online course attend a 3h training in person for a few people, i think there was a separate training session to learn to operate the machine that scans your NRIC help to set up the polling station the day before (4h for most people, but I was asked to go down for another 2.5h in the morning to do inventory check) And of course Polling day itself - we were originally told 6am-8.30pm, but some of us had to be there at 4.45am, and of course after the extension we ended up leaving at 10.30pm. I've never worked 17+ hours in a day before. So even if you ignore the 2h extension, i think the pay works out to about $10/hour. And you deal with some weird shit which i'll talk about later Are my votes secret? Aren't there PAP people watching you at the polling station? Yes, from what I can see votes are really secret, there's a serial number on the ballot paper but it's impossible to trace each vote back to a voter without anyone knowing. And yes, each contesting party can send people down to witness the process, PAP always has witnesses there but opposition may not send people down to every site. Even so, there is a specific place they have to sit at, and they cannot see what vote you cast. Nor can they recognise the faces of everyone who went in. Did you know about the 2h extension? What happened? We only found out about the 2h extension at 7+. In fact our supervisor was as confused as us, he told us that he saw the news on CNA website but ELD hasn't given any instructions. We had a lot of questions (especially since 7-8pm was supposed to be for higher-risk patients and we had to wear mask/face shield/gown/gloves) but he said she had no idea either. Our polling station didn't really have a long queue for most of the day, but i guess some others did? Each polling station was supposed to have 20+ people manning it, but only 6 will stay back and don all the biohazard gear to serve people on MC and SHN. By the time we heard about the extension, we were down to 6 people all wearing the gear, and the rest were told to go out of the site to prevent contamination. Then 10min later, our supervisor was told that all 20+ people should man the station from 7-9pm, and only wear the gear from 9-10pm for the sick/SHN voters. But by that point we already wore all our gear, and ELD did not provide us with any extra gear (there was only just enough for 6 of us), so we couldn't take it off otherwise we wouldn't have any left for later. And our supervisor decided that since one SHN person had voted at 7+, the 6 of us should wear the gear and man the whole station from 7-10pm. How does wearing the gear feel? There was a N95 mask, face shield, gown and gloves. Wearing the gear was really uncomfortable, especially for 3 hours. I have no idea how nurses and doctors do it all day. Plus ELD didn't cater any spares, so for 3hours i couldn't drink water or pee because we had nothing to change out of. Breathing through N95 mask made my face all sweaty, and the face shield trapped all the heat around my face. Plus the face shield kept slipping off, it was really loose. I couldn't really sit properly on a chair because the back of the gown was taped up, and if i leaned back the masking tape would stick to the chair. We couldn't use our phones, and my polling station had less than 10 voters during those 3 hours, so we mostly just sat around and chatted and complained about our miserable lives.