A young Italian communist was sent by his party to observe parliamentary elections in 1953. Amerigo Ormea spends a long gray Sunday in the Cottolengo, a district, large, church -operated home for mentally handicapped people in Turin, who still has more than a thousand residents today. In the polling stations there, the protagonist should check the correctness of the procedure from the party's point of view. Italo Calvinos seventy side long, sometimes excruciating history “The Day of an election assistant” from 1963 (“La Giornata di Uno Scrutatore”, German 1964 with Fischer), as the author emphasizes in a follow -up note, only experienced experiences from two Italian parliamentary elections on. It provides a magnificent description of the multiple uncertainties of democratic practice.
