Yes, Murriel Oles has seen blood spilled at a polling place. She knew a man who worked the railroad for 30 years without an accident, then volunteered to work the election and promptly sliced his finger open on a folding table.

Oles trains poll workers for the Placer County elections office, where she’s been working and volunteering for almost 50 years. What hasn’t she seen?

She started at the Placer County Elections Office so long ago that she isn’t even fully certain of the year — 1978, maybe? She was a volunteer clerk who rose through the ranks over several decades of service; now, she’s the lead poll worker trainer. Oles, 80, said she’d been trying to retire for about 20 years, but the siren song of the voting booths — and the difficulty of finding a replacement to live up to her exacting standards — have kept her at the elections office.

She said Tuesday’s primary could be her last election, because she believes she’s finally found the right whippersnapper to take over: Marcus Smith, 26, a clerk-recorder-elections technician young enough to be one of her grandchildren (most of whom she has also roped into volunteering for Placer County elections). Smith is the seventh person she’s trained, and she is hoping the seventh one sticks.

Much of Oles’ work verges on the tedious: She’ll show a roomful of people how to log the serial numbers of tamper-proof seals. She’ll explain the wires for the various machines at the polling places are all color-coded so they’ll know which plug goes where. Be careful, she tells them, when they reach into the innards of the black auxiliary ballot box — find the poll worker with both the longest arms and the longest sleeves.

But all these small administrative actions add up to a grand national exercise.

“It’s a cornerstone of our republic,” Oles said. “It’s what we all have the opportunity to do. And I wish more people took it as an obligation.”

For Oles, though, it’s not just an obligation. It’s an absolute pleasure.

A farm inspires a life of service

Murriel Oles was born in 1943, the 10th of 11 children “on a dirt farm in South Dakota,” she said. “Totally organic — we just didn’t know it was organic.”

The family had no electricity on the farm, but Oles’ father, registered Democrat Rudolph John Henry Vitense, made sure to have the batteries to power the wireless radio. He and his registered Republican wife, Lois, would gather the kids, Oles said, “so that we could listen to both political conventions gavel-to-gavel.” Her parents instilled a sense of civic duty when she was a small thing.

In 1966, Oles moved to Loomis with her husband, Bob. Around a decade later, when she was in her mid-30s, she got involved with the administration of elections.

Although she’d been interested in national politics when she was younger — when she was just a teenager, she door-knocked for Richard Nixon in his failed 1960 run against John F. Kennedy — she’s much more interested in local politics now.

“My focus is my hometown, my schools, the schools that my grandchildren and my great grandchildren go to,” she said — she has seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. “More people need to realize that the most control you have over your day-to-day lives is your local government — your board of supervisors, your school boards, your town councils, your city councils — because that’s where you make the most difference.

“Of course, you need to be involved in politics, if that’s your desire, but start at home. Make a difference where you live.”

She’s recruited plenty of her own family members to work during Placer County elections. On Friday, her daughter, Robyn Berkler, was at the elections office building in Rocklin; her grandson, Robert Yannacone, an election officer, was also in the building. Her other daughter, Tonya Anicich, was previously an election inspector, as was Tonya’s late husband, Vince. Two granddaughters, Vanessa and Natasha Anicich, as well as her youngest grandson, Austin Anicich, had worked elections in the past; her husband, Bob, has also worked the polls.

None of them had quite the storied suffrage career of their matriarch. Oles fielded calls from election aides the Friday before the primary with delight.

“We want them to call and confirm,” she said. “Those people … just live their lives every day. And we bring them into training for six, seven, eight hours, and hit him with a firehose of information. So it’s no wonder that they are confused. We just don’t want them to guess at a procedure.”

She was expounding on her family history when the phone rang. “Excuse me just a minute,” she said, picking up the black handset. “Help desk, this is Murriel.” She listened. “Well, Derrell, have I got an answer for you,” she told the senior election aide on the other end of the line. “I always have all the answers. Spit it out.”

Derrell Hill had a problem with a woman who had botched her ballot at the polling place and had also received a mail-in ballot. Oles walked him through how to make sure this woman’s vote would be counted. She hung up the phone with a twinkle in her eye.

“I love it,” she said. “That’s my best friend Derrell at the Roseville Vets’ Hall.”

Stacy Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Placer County Clerk-Recorder-Elections Office, said Oles talks like that to everyone. “Direct communicator,” she said. “And I’ll tell you, it helps a lot.”

Oles said her favorite part of an election is the 30 days after voting ends, the canvass period. Each county finishes counting every last vote during those weeks, along with an audit of the election process. They catch wonky ballots. They review procedural errors by the aides — maybe someone signed the wrong form one night, maybe there’s a mislaid piece of paperwork to track down.

Maybe to another person, this seems dry. To Oles, dotting the I’s is the best part.

“It’s the culmination the process,” she said. “The pride that I was a part of my community, of my county.”

Oles has trained thousands of volunteers in her decades at the elections office — she’s led the trainings since 1996. Speaking about the electoral process at one point, her eyes welled with tears. She began waxing poetic about the way that so many elected officials used to have regular jobs they returned to rather than make a career out of politics when the phone rang.

“Absolutely not,” she told the person on the other end of the line. “If you open those red carts today, you will be breaching security.”

A little question about a procedural issue about a cart in service of a cornerstone of our republic.

As Oles will tell you, democracy is in the details.