Few people want to be poll workers, and that’s a nationwide problem
Poll workers tend to be middle-aged or elderly. Indeed, 56 percent of poll workers in 2016 were 61 and older, according to the Election Assistance Commission survey. Younger people often have work or school conflicts, Abney said.
He has traveled around Pennsylvania, showing up at community events and local election offices to spread the word of their initiative. After all, he tells people, it’s an opportunity to be civically engaged and get paid. There is no set salary for poll workers statewide, but poll workers in Allegheny County, for example, earn between $115 and $140 a day.
The group’s efforts seem to be working. Nationally, organizers have recruited more than 2,400 people – 924 of whom live in Pennsylvania, where organizers have spent more time because needs are more acute.
Cherie Debrest was ready to sign up to be a poll worker in Pennsylvania. For 18 years, she worked with parents and caregivers as a social worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, guiding them through the obstacles of medical care. Over the last three presidential elections, Debrest, 49, led voter registration drives at the hospital, registering staff and the family members of patients whenever she could.
Until this election, though, she never sought to become a poll worker on Election Day. For years, she’s noticed poll workers were much older than Hundreds of volunteers and election officials work on the absentee ballot count in November 2016 in Minneapolis.
her. Who, other than retirees, has the time to take off work on a Tuesday, she thought. But when she saw the city was looking for new poll workers, she figured it was time to act. “I was already thinking about it,” she said. “There’s no time like the present, so I got on the website and signed up.”
Counties and states have tried to recruit new poll workers for years. Local election officials are even targeting high schoolers for the job.
After Hamilton County, Ohio, implemented electronic poll books in 2015, county officials partnered with local pizza chain Larosa’s to hold a countywide competition to see which high school could contribute the most poll workers. The winning school gets a pizza party, and students who serve earn $181.50 for the day.
The benefits of younger poll workers are undeniable, said Sherry Poland, the director of elections in Hamilton County, Ohio. They bring enthusiasm, energy and a familiarity and comfort with technology like electronic poll books and optical ballot scanners, she said. They
also are more likely to remain poll workers for future elections.
“It sparks an interest in voting and civic engagement at an early age that might last a lifetime,” Poland said.
Hamilton County had only four high school poll workers in 2012, Poland said. In 2016 it had 367 – 14 percent of the county’s poll workers that year, she added.
In 2016, Ohio, California, Delaware and Michigan were the only states where more than 10 percent of poll workers were 25 or younger, according to the Election Assistance Commission. (Washington, D.C. also beat the 10 percent standard, which was the national average.) A quarter of poll workers in California were 25 and younger.
Hamilton County, however, still struggles to get enough poll workers for elections, following the national trend, Poland said. It’s an “extremely long day,” she said, and getting people to commit to a fourhour training class, a twohour precinct set-up, and a 15-hour Election Day is difficult.
More than half of states
allow students over 16 or 17 years old to serve as poll workers, according to the Election Assistance Commission.
In 2013, President Barack Obama ordered a review of election procedures after the 2012 presidential election was plagued with long lines. One of the “signal weaknesses” of the U.S. election system, a national commission found, was “the absence of a dependable, well-trained corps of poll workers.”
The primary causes of the problem, according to a 2014 report from New York-based think tank Demos, are a lack of uniform training before Election Day, disparate wages, and little recruitment among public employees and high school and college students.
The study found that only 30 states require that all poll workers receive training. Good poll workers boost voters’ confidence in elections, according to a poll of 2016 voters from nonprofit Democracy Fund. Jurisdictions across the country need to find creative solutions to recruit and train new poll workers, the foundation said.