Ahead of the 2016 election, Maya Patel, then a student at the University of Texas at Austin, registered 250 students to vote. But after seeing first-hand the hours-long lines voters were forced to navigate before casting their ballots, she knew there was more work to do. Two years later, she worked to install an additional polling location on the campus just in time for the midterm elections.
Now Patel is getting ready to be a poll worker in November. Why? Well, because it’s fun, and more importantly, she said, there’s a dire poll worker shortage around the country that could threaten the presidential election.
Elderly and retired people normally comprise a large portion of poll workers, but this year many of them have dropped out over fears of contracting Covid-19. In the 2016 presidential election, about 917,694 poll workers were responsible for managing more than 100,000 polling sites. This year, even as half of the American electorate is expected to vote by mail, states are facing stark staffing challenges.
In March, 800 poll workers in Palm Beach county, Florida, didn’t show up for their scheduled precinct shifts, causing many locations to open late, if at all. Ahead of the April primary election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, only five out of 180 polling locations opened, largely because of poll worker scarcity. In July, the Maryland Association of Election Officials reported a poll worker shortage of nearly 14,000 people, referring to the lack of workers as an “emergency situation”. More often than not, the closures affected people of color the most.
While the science is still unclear about differences in coronavirus susceptibility based on age, Covid-19 infections have proven less deadly to young people. As such, boards of elections across the country and voting groups are recruiting high school and college students.
As the Texas coordinator for the Campus Vote Project, Patel is one of many organizers around the country working with a voting access campaign called Power the Polls, which aims to recruit 250,000 people to work the polls this November, many of whom are young people. “We have a serious problem with a not too difficult solution,” she said.
The duties for poll workers vary slightly from state to state depending on staffing, expected voter turnout or the kind of voting machine in use. Patel said that when she worked the polls in the Texas primary in March, her duties ranged from setting up the check-in station, making sure all of the voting machines worked, to cutting out the individual “I voted” stickers. Without poll workers there are fewer people to check voters in, answer questions and sanitize voting machines. Lines can form, turning voting into an hours-long process.
In Harris county, Texas, where Houston is located, voter logistical coordinator Kristina Nichols said that she was aiming to hire at least 1,000 students to assist with early voting and election night, managing ballot drop off locations and sorting mail-in ballots. Nichols said that poll workers who have worked elections in prior years simply were not returning due to coronavirus concerns.
Training for poll workers has changed a bit this year, of course. In addition to legal information about voter identification or authentication keys for voting machines, student workers will receive coronavirus public health training as well. Nichols said “students are just as concerned about [coronavirus]” as some may live with a relative or parent who is high risk.
In Hamilton county, Ohio, young people play a specific role in facilitating elections where older people may not feel as confident: technology use. Sherry Poland, the director of elections at the Hamilton county board of elections, runs the Youth at the Booth program, which recruits 17- and 18-year-old high school seniors to work the polls. Poland said that the younger poll workers have a symbiotic relationship with the older generation of poll workers.
For instance, young people can quickly check voters in on electronic equipment, leaving the older “adult counterparts who are more experienced to handle voters who are having concerns”. In an election as polarized as this one, Poland said that working the polls is also an opportunity for young people to participate in a civic-minded process, not a partisan one.
The voting booth “is a place where people of different political parties come together with a common goal”, Poland said. “And that is to run a fair election.”
Meanwhile, the same challenges that elections officials face this year –from Covid-19 to the George Floyd protests – may actually be driving people to sign up to be poll workers.
Spencer Berg, the recruitment coordinator for the Wake county board of elections in North Carolina, said young people were taking the initiative to sign up themselves. In prior elections, the county might receive 70 total applications from young people, but this year, they have hit that number and expect it to climb to 100 students. “We’ve just been really fortunate with people wanting to do their part and pitch in,” Berg said.
Berg attributes young people’s interest in supporting the county’s election efforts not just in the opportunity to become civically engaged, but as a response to coronavirus itself. Berg said: “Everyone is going through the same thing, you kind of feel almost helpless, defeating.
“I think people see that they can give back.”