Metropolitan Diary: A Widow at the Polls Presidential elections always get me riled up - and eight years ago I was really energized. I wanted to participate in some way, so I volunteered to work at the polls. Plus I was unemployed and it paid $200 for the day! I was assigned to work at my own West Village polling center. All the voters who came to my table seemed genuinely excited to vote. No exception was a mother and her adult daughter who arrived together. Each signed the roll book, one under the other. The mother then told me that her husband, whose name was listed just below her own, could be removed from the rolls: he had died just a week earlier. Stunned, I expressed how sorry I was. "Oh, don't be" she instructed. He already voted absentee.