Staffing America's polls is a monumental task akin to deploying a civilian army one small squad at a time. In 2016's presidential election, nearly 110 million Americans voted in person at nearly 117,000 locations, according to a report from the Voter Protection Corps, "Keep the Polls Open: An Action Plan to Protect In-Person Voting and Voting Rights in the Era of COVID-19."
"More than 917,000 poll workers -- sometimes known as election judges, booth workers, wardens, or commissioners -- operated these sites. The EAC [U.S. Election Assistance Commission] has reported -- an average of between seven and eight poll workers per voting site consistently since 2012," the report said. "Urban areas have fewer polling locations per capita and are at greater risk of long lines and overcrowding in the event of poll closures and consolidation."
"If you think of the scope of the poll worker recruitment problem, it's almost as big as the decennial [U.S.] Census," said Quentin Palfrey, Voter Protection Corps chair. "In ordinary years, a lot of places have trouble recruiting poll workers. But during the pandemic, I think we are going to have massive shortfalls. And part of that is because more than 50 percent of poll workers, historically, have been over the age of 60. That population is going to be very reticent."
According to Sancho, the states that ran the smoothest recent elections (including the historic shift to voting from home) saw roughly three-quarters of their electorate vote by mail and one-quarter vote in person. He cited Iowa and Kentucky as examples. Should that ratio hold for the fall's general election, it means that hundreds of thousands of poll workers would be needed.
Historically, county-level officials -- not political campaigns, political parties or activist groups -- recruit poll workers, said Mike Firestone, co-author of the Corps' report. Those officials can be a county election supervisor, appointed election official, judge, or municipal clerk who hires poll workers and is responsible for their training. Individuals must apply to be poll workers, which isn't the same as being assigned by a political campaign or party to be a poll observer.
"There's a hodgepodge of rules that we only lightly touch on in the report that create a ton of different restrictions and criteria for who can serve," Firestone said. "In many, many cases, you need to be registered to vote in the jurisdiction where you're going to serve. There's a residency requirement plus an active voter status requirement. In some cases, you'll need to add onto that a party affiliation to fill a particular spot. So outside organizations, particularly political campaigns, have left this function to local government and really focused their own efforts to having observers at the polls to make sure people aren't getting disenfranchised or knocking on doors to get out the vote."
Filling Needed Ranks
Ryan Pierannunzi, Fair Elections Center's project manager for WorkElections.com's data and poll worker recruitment tool, said the portal seeks to help people sift through the application process. Individuals can find their state and county, view required local qualifications, access application forms (for students and non-students), and see their potential pay. The Work Elections portal also has contact information for local election officials.
"We're trying to team up with everyone who's interested," he said. "We just launched Power the Polls on June 30. We have a plan to reach out to a lot of different groups. One member of Power the Polls is Civic Alliance, which is made up of leading companies across the country. The Time to Vote coalition is part of that as well; they're committed to giving Election Day off for their employees... We have Comedy Central and MTV involved. Another big part of this is college students and young people. So we're working with groups like Students Learn Students Vote and other nonprofits to get the word out."
Some grassroots voting rights activists and organizers contacted by Voting Booth who have formidable field operations aimed at contacting voters in swing states and communities of color said they had heard some talk about potential poll worker campaigns, but not more than that.
"I have heard this as a strategy coming from several different corners. I haven't really seen anybody who's actually launched a detailed recruitment campaign other than occasional social media posts saying 'let's get more young people to apply' or people posting a link on how people can get involved," said Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund. "A real recruitment campaign -- I haven't seen that. I know it's in the works from different groups... It's a potential strategy to deal with a key problem and also get younger people engaged in a different way."
The Black Voters Matter Fund is focusing on eight states, including mostly Southern states -- like Florida, Georgia and North Carolina -- as well as Pennsylvania. One of its partners is a voter contact operation targeting Southern states including Texas run by Andrea Miller of People Demanding Action, which has been sending hundreds of thousands of texts and postcards weekly since early 2020. She, too, said that she had not heard about a serious recruitment campaign -- but was fully supportive.
"We have got to have our people inside the polls. Not just outside. So this is great," Miller said. "It would be interesting. How do we recruit poll workers? Where do they go? We are running phone banks and we are running text banks. We could easily work this in. What would we be asking people to do? How would we be telling them to go sign up?"
"There needs to be an activation process. Most people have no clue about this," said Gabriela Lemus, treasurer of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group. "They don't even know what poll workers do. When they go vote, they think, 'All these nice people. They must be volunteers.' Which they are. But the fact is it is a very organized system."
Sancho said he only heard about the Fair Elections Center's poll worker campaign in early July. The WorkElections.com portal was a good start but didn't go far enough, he said, based on years of experience recruiting registering voters and poll workers from Tallahassee's HBCU, Florida A&M University. During his tenure, those Black students helped turn Leon County's judiciary from a mostly all-white bench to having half of the elected judges be people of color.
The Work Elections portal will send voters to their state and county election websites, where they can access online applications and other information. But it doesn't collect follow-up information to assist people trying to apply to be a poll worker, Sancho said. It also doesn't walk students through the steps to update their voter registration information, so that they can be a poll worker in their county where they are attending school or now living -- which may not be the same as their county of residence when they initially registered to vote. (Many states, like Georgia, require poll workers to be residents and registered voters in the county they will serve.)
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