San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Poll worker shortage may not hit Bay Area
While states across the country are frantically scrambling to recruit poll workers, Bay Area counties are cautiously optimistic about their staffing for the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“Our recruiting efforts for election workers are going well, but we are always looking for more,” said Tim Dupuis, Alameda
County’s registrar of voters.
Every active voter in California will be getting a ballot in the mail before the election, but counties are still required to provide polling places for people who want to cast their ballot in person. And that means finding people to staff those sites.
Even with the looming threat of the coronavirus,
Marin County has already filled all 320 of its poll worker slots, said Lynda Roberts, the county registrar.
“We also have over 500 new applications that we did not have a place for,” she said. “We are holding onto those applications to use when the poll workers who are currently assigned to work the election cancel their assignments.”
Even San Francisco, which needs about 3,000 workers to staff the city’s 588 neighborhood polling places, is in good shape, said John Arntz, the city election’s chief.
“We still need bilingual poll workers, especially those who speak Chinese or other Asian languages,” he said. “But there’s really been a lot of enthusiasm from people who want to participate in this election.”
That’s not the story elsewhere in the country, where worries about the coronavirus have made it harder to find election workers, both for the primaries and for November’s general election.
In Wisconsin’s April primary, a shortage of workers left Milwaukee, a city of nearly 600,000, with just five inperson polling places instead of the 88 it normally has. In Green Bay, the typical 31 polling places were slashed to just two.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evans activated the state’s National Guard for the primary, sending 700 soldiers to help at polling places in 40 counties.
It was a similar situation in New Jersey, where more than 120
National Guard soldiers were used to help with the July primary.
Frank LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state, said last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the thing we’re thinking about more than anything right now is poll worker recruitment.”
Ohio is still a few thousand people short of the minimum 37,000 poll workers needed to work the election and far below its target of 60,000.
Finding people to work the polls is not a new problem. A 2017 study by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that more than 900,000 poll workers were needed for the 2016 presidential election, and about 65% of the jurisdictions surveyed reported that it was difficult to find enough people.
About 56% of the people working the polls that year were 61 or older. That’s an ominous sign for 2020, because older people are the group most at risk of the coronavirus.
It’s a concern, Arntz said.
“Certainly we’re hearing some hesitation from people who worked in the past,” he said. While Marin County has had success in getting experienced workers back for the upcoming election, the virus is still a problem, Roberts said.
“We’ve tried to discuss the subject with each poll worker, especially those aged 65 and up,” she said, “to make sure they will not cancel or their family members will not ask them to cancel if the virus peaks at election time.”
Power the Polls, a collaboration among nonprofit organizations and businesses, is trying to solve the problem by appealing to a new generation to work on election day. The group’s partners include entertainment groups including MTV, Comedy Central and ViacomCBS, businesses such as Starbucks, Levi Strauss and Uber, community groups including the Boys and Girls Club of America and the YMCA, and a variety of labor organizations.
“Most poll workers are over the age of 60 and, in the era of uncertainty caused by the coronavirus, fewer are signing up for the job,” the organization says. The group is looking to find 250,000 people, mostly “healthy, lowrisk candidates,” to sign up on its website. It plans to forward the names to the appropriate states.
The effort to recruit younger workers is seeing some results in California.
In August, Secretary of State Alex Padilla opened a central site where people could apply to become poll workers, saying that “we need the next generation of poll workers to step up and meet the moment.”
As of last week, 49,000 Californians had signed up at the state portal, with 14,600 of the registrations sent from Power the Polls, said Paula Valle, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state.
A National Poll Worker Recruitment Day effort on Sept. 1, sponsored by the federal Election Assistance Commission, also had an effect.
“We got a big surge of candidates,” said San Francisco’s Arntz.
Other counties are making their own efforts. Solano County, for example, has put together an Adopt a Polling Place plan, signing up service groups including the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, plus churches and community organizations, to pledge to go through training and staff one or more polling places.
“We’ve done outreach to community groups, and the word spreads,” said John Gardner, the county’s assistant registrar. “We already have 97% of the people we need, and we’re even increasing the number of polling places to 100, up from 92 in the primary.”
But election officials warn that a lot can happen between now and the election. Recruiting people is one thing, but getting them through the required training and into the polling places is another.
“Hopefully, they’ll stick,” Arntz said. “But it’s still a bit early in the process. We haven’t even started the training yet.”
That’s why San Francisco and other counties expect to keep recruiting.
“I’d like to get 500 to 800 more people,” Arntz said.
But looking at the woes and worries in other states, Bay Area election officials are happy where they are less than two months before election day.
“We’ve had a lot of people just stepping up, calling us and saying, ‘I want to work,’ ” said Roberts of Marin County.