Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Election officials prepare for threat of coronavirus
Precautions include ‘big jugs’ of hand sanitizer, extra poll workers ahead of Florida primary
When early voting for the presidential primary begins in Palm Beach County on Saturday, each of the 16 voting centers will be equipped with hand sanitizer. Extra poll workers are being lined up. And the Supervisor of Elections Office plans to communicate coronavirus information directly to elections workers.
Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Wendy Sartory Link said Friday she’s added coronavirus preparations to her planning for the March 17 elections, which feature presidential primaries and elections in 20 of the county’s cities, towns and villages.
“We are concerned about if there is an outbreak, especially if it’s in Florida, will people be comfortable coming to the polls, will poll workers be comfortable coming to the polls. So we’re trying do to what we can to offset that,” Link told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “We’re just trying to think in advance what would make people more comfortable.”
Link said she had ordered “a lot of big jugs of hand sanitizer, which are hard to find now.” Each early voting site will have sanitizer available for every voter who wants to use it. She said she’s hoping to find enough for each of the 465 neighborhood polling sites on primary day. The Centers for Disease Control recommends hand washing; when that isn’t feasible, it recommends hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol.
She has considered masks but said that they’re difficult to find and the CDC doesn’t recommend them.
Link said her poll worker department would increase staffing slightly. “We are going to staff with additional poll workers. If all goes well we may have a few more than we need ... but I want to make sure that if there is a concern or anybody’s out or uncomfortable that we’re going to be fully staffed.”
The original plan was for about 3,000 poll workers on March 17. Now the target is 3,510 primary day workers.
Even if there isn’t a coronavirus impact, Link said it wouldn’t be a waste of money. The county has new voting machines for 2020, and giving poll workers experience when there’s a short ballot and lower turnout would be good practice for November. She said she didn’t yet know how many extra poll workers she’d bring in.
The elections office is also turning to the CDC for information it plans to communicate directly to the poll workers who will be interacting with the public “so that they’re hearing the actual information as opposed to maybe any inflammatory stories out there that would concern people.”
Broward Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci said by email Friday that he was consulting with other supervisors of elections, the Florida secretary of state and public health officials “to ensure we are engaging in proper and proportional best elections practices for the upcoming March presidential primary.”
Link discussed coronavirus preparations in a brief interview after her office conducted the preprimary “logic and accuracy” test of voting equipment. As League of Women Voters members, local government officials whose communities have elections, and reporters watched, ballots were fed into voting machines for each city, and early and vote by mail ballots were tabulated to make sure the final results matched the ballots filled out by elections office staffers. The test didn’t reveal any problems.
Antonacci said the people and machines worked well in Broward’s test earlier in the week. “It was rather boring, and I say that meaning ‘boring’ is a very good thing.”