"We know the precincts out are strong for us," he added.
Edith eventually read off her totals, which King said "would be the difference," if the votes from Edith's precinct turned out to be the ones missing.
When precincts ran out, Ms. Brunner said, voters were told to stay at the polling place while new ones were delivered, which typically happened in about an hour.
The privatisation of public space continues apace, with new developments sectioning off parts of the city and subjecting them to rule by security guards who patrol their precincts, checking out that everything is running smoothly in the chain coffee shops where mille-feuille pastry is sold.
Theirs is the invisible part of elections, where someone has to have sorted out, precinct by precinct, which races are on which ballots in which places.
One of them was Diego Vinales, an Argentinian national so frightened that he might be deported as a homosexual that he tried to escape the police precinct by jumping out of a two-story window, impaling himself on a 14 inches spike fence.
The surveys taken on election day are clustered to a small handful of precincts out of the thousands of possible precincts.
This year in Afghanistan, almost a thousand precincts out of the 6,500 originally announced have already been closed due to security concerns.
Pat Zierke, his precinct captain, set out her cookies — these were homemade — a few feet from the Clinton snacks, on a table she had covered with a lace cloth.
"No work will take place at the church, including no meeting there to hand out precinct walking assignments so as to not even give the appearance of politicking at the church," one of the documents said.
