Generations of voters
Poll chief has been working since 1975, supervising election days and counts
“Hi, Miss Jones, come on in, you and your daughter. How you feeling?”
It’s the kind of warm greeting you get from Bettye Coleman, the matriarch of Milwaukee polling places, if Northcott Neighborhood House is where you vote.
“She knows everybody’s name,” said Carla Isabell, who brought her mother, Katie Jones, to the polls Tuesday.
Bettye, 81, is chief inspector at Northcott, 2460 N. 6th St., and the city’s longest-serving person in the job. She told me she signed up as a poll worker in 1975 and has seen generations of voters in the north side neighborhood.
From growing up in small town Mississippi, she knows the importance of voting and what it looks like when you can’t.
“When I was a child, it was so hard for the minority to vote. People gave up their lives for us to vote. I knew that working at the polls was a way I could help other people and encourage them to come to vote.”
Voters trickled in to the meeting room set up as a polling place. Bettye and her staff of half a dozen women helped them register if need be, and routed everyone to vote in either Ward 141 or 142.
Everything was running smoothly, just as it did for the busy presidential election of 2016 when partisan poll observers watched for anything out of the ordinary.
“We had no disturbance because everybody knows I don’t put up with that. I kill ’em with love,” Bettye laughed. She’s quotable like that. “Everybody is your family if you treat them right,” she said.
And she teased Journal Sentinel photographer Angela Peterson: “You put the light on and make me look like Lena Horne.”
Moving to Milwaukee as a young woman, Bettye worked for 30 years as a certified nursing assistant for Milwaukee County. She married and raised three children, which led to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Bettye would take a day off work for elections in the days before she retired. Her first years as a poll inspector were at Garfield School before the site changed to Northcott, just two blocks from her house.
As chief, she makes sure everything is running right and all votes are properly counted and delivered to the area dropoff site, Center Street Library. It’s a long day and Bettye is often on her feet. The workers nosh throughout the shift on goodies they bring in.
During my visit Tuesday, Bettye put on her coat and hat and went outside in the rain to help a disabled person with curbside voting. It goes with the job, which pays her $185 for the day. Her crew members get $130, plus $15-25 for training.
If this interests you, Milwaukee needs more election workers. Apply online at Milwaukee.gov/election or call (414) 286-VOTE.
“We need to recruit and hire an additional 1,000 election workers to support the November 6 general election,” said Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht.
He called the shortage of workers a near-crisis and attributed it to three factors: emerging generations may not feel the same sense of civic responsibility as past generations, political fatigue, and a perception that voting is political and therefore contentious.
Bettye plans to continue in the job “until God calls me home.”
She is already looking forward to the next election and was calling out to voters as they finished, “August the 14th! Put that on the calendar so you can get back here!”