Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
Kristi Serwin knows that Americans clamoring for social justice and decent treatment of working people can correct the nation's course only with a fair, accessible election.
But she's also observed the nation's dire shortages of poll workers result in long lines and force the closure of polling places around the country, depressing the voter turnout needed to drive change.
Serwin refuses to let that plight befall her Ohio community, so she signed up to serve on a precinct election board, ensuring her neighbors have convenient access to the ballot box on November 3.
Without many more volunteers like her, American democracy will hang in the balance this Election Day.
The COVID-19 pandemic decimated the ranks of the nation's poll workers at the very time Donald Trump's spurious attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in votes make conveniently located, fully staffed voting places more important than ever.
If they're confronted with long lines at the polls or forced out of their regular voting places, some Americans will just skip the election, no matter how high the stakes—and no matter how critical it is that their voices be heard—this year. And if America fails to conduct a fair, robust election, democracy dies.
Because this election will shape the nation for years to come, the labor movement urges members across the country to emulate Serwin's example and perform a patriotic service that will safeguard America's future.
Poll workers set up voting machines, check in voters, accept completed ballots and transport them to county seats for tabulation. During the primary and general elections, these unsung heroes log long hours so their fellow citizens can exercise an indispensable constitutional right.
"If I can make sure somebody's line is shorter or give them a convenient place to vote, I'm sure as heck going to do it," said Serwin, a control room operator at BP-Husky Toledo and member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 346. "I felt it was something I needed to do."
Most Americans want to have the option of voting by mail this year because they fear contracting COVID-19 at polling places.
However, Trump falsely claims that mail-in ballots invite voter fraud, and his Republican allies already filed a blizzard of lawsuits aimed at thwarting mail balloting. His shameful efforts to discount mail-in votes and silence Americans' voices, driven solely by his fear of losing the election, make traditional polling places more essential than ever.
Yet COVID-19 exacerbated the shortages of poll workers that states and counties already face in every election. Many of the volunteers in their 60s and 70s who regularly fulfill this vital role declined to serve this year because they're in poor health and fear contracting the coronavirus from voters. Other longtime poll workers bowed out because they worry not about their own health but bringing the virus home to fragile loved ones.
Without a wave of younger volunteers to take their places, election officials across the country will find it virtually impossible to keep all of their polling places open.
Ohio remains about 3,500 poll workers short of the bare minimum required to operate polls in all 88 counties. It really needs about 27,000 more volunteers to cover anticipated no-shows and illness-related call-offs on November 3 and to ensure polling places actually open—and remain open—all day.
Concerned about the rising tide of injustice in America and furious with Trump's attacks on working people, including the rollback of safety regulations protecting refinery workers like her, Serwin recognizes that this is a pivotal election.
And knowing what happens when Americans fail to answer the call to serve as poll workers—the city of Milwaukee, for example, closed all but a handful of its 180 voting places during this past spring's primary—she vowed to do her part to ensure the honest, inclusive election that Trump opposes.
Serwin, coordinator for Local 346's Women of Steel program, agreed to serve in a neighboring precinct, Danbury, which needed poll workers so much that the county put her in charge of the election board there even though she's volunteering for the first time.
She opted to take her floating Juneteenth holiday—provided under the USW's contract with BP—to make sure she's available all day.
"What better way to honor that date?" Serwin said, noting Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States and also highlights the continuing fight for equality in America.
Poll workers' service yields dividends for themselves and the public.
Janice Payne, a member of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), began serving as a poll worker in Davenport, Iowa, when she retired from Alcoa about 11 years ago. County elections officials sought her help because of the pressing need for volunteers even then.
"If we don't participate, we're as good as saying we don't care," Payne explained. "I felt very honored that they would even ask me."
Like Serwin, Payne took charge of a precinct election board in a nearby community, taking great pride in fairly and efficiently running a polling place where minority voters in prior years had been turned away because their names and addresses ostensibly failed to match the information in election records.
Not only did Payne go to great lengths to help minority residents cast ballots but she also used audible readers—designed for people with vision impairments—to help citizens with reading difficulties vote as well.
Under her leadership of the precinct, she said, turnout increased from fewer than 100 voters per election to more than 300.
But this year, she reluctantly stepped aside. She helps care for a prematurely born granddaughter with many health problems and fears bringing COVID-19, or another ailment, into the house.
"I don't want to be the one to cause her to become sick," she said, noting it's past time for the next generation to step forward and serve as she has.
One day, Serwin wants to be able to tell her own grandchildren that she did her part to safeguard democracy and save an election the president himself tried to sabotage.
She hopes many other Americans also will volunteer to serve as poll workers in coming weeks, embracing a civic duty at a time their country urgently needs their help.
"I feel we all need to step up," Serwin said. "We have to make sure voting is accessible to everybody."
Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In 2000, Ion Sancho had a front-row seat to the partisan mayhem and legal posturing surrounding Florida's presidential recount. The Florida Supreme Court asked Sancho, then supervisor of elections in Florida's capital, to be its technical adviser—second in charge—of overseeing the recount, which the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly halted in its Bush v. Gore decision, elevating George W. Bush to the presidency.
As the U.S. heads toward 2020's general election amid a pandemic and President Trump's continued attacks on voting from home, Sancho has been reviewing trends from the resumed primaries and sees both how Trump and the GOP are positioning the party for another court-decided electoral outcome—and the single remedy that would frustrate those plans.
"The plan that Trump is doing is to denigrate mail ballot voting and force people to show up at the polls on Election Day—and overwhelm the polls so it looks like massive chaos and fraud," said Sancho, who recalled the "Brooks Brothers riot" by GOP operatives that disrupted Miami's recount. "But it's all dependent on overwhelming the polls on Election Day; having people wait in line for five, six, seven hours, and then adding to the cacophony of 'vote fraud, vote fraud.' If it's done smoothly on Election Day, that whole strategy really melts away."
Since 2020's primaries and runoffs resumed in April, there has been a historic shift to voting from home with mail-in ballots in many states. The pandemic has also prompted a poll worker exodus and steep reductions in in-person voting sites, especially in swing states. Many voters have waited for hours to cast a ballot, especially in urban centers and communities of color, disenfranchising unknown numbers of voters.
"The reason we are not getting people working the polls is that poll workers, traditionally, are in the center of the target range for COVID-19: 65-to-75-year-old individuals," said Sancho, who added that the younger people now demonstrating against racist policing should not just be urged to register and vote this fall, but should also enlist as poll workers—especially in cities.
"These young people who are demonstrating in the streets, understanding for the first time that institutional racism is America, these people, if they work the polls, could save the entire elections process," said Sancho, who ran Leon County's elections for 28 years. "What if all of the African American students at the historically Black colleges [and universities (HBCUs)]—I know Atlanta has a couple—what if they staffed the polls in Fulton County? Here in Tallahassee, what if FAMU [Florida A&M University] ensured that the African American polls are completely covered on November 3? And you get paid for it."
"If you do it, you frustrate the plan that Trump has set up to call that there was massive fraud and chaos and try to send this to the courts—to the SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] where they will try to pull off the same thing they did in 2000 on a 5-to-4 vote."
Staffing America's Polls
Sancho, a law school graduate, is thinking more widely about 2020's general election than many election administrators, who tend to see their jobs as implementing the rules issued by the state. But he is not the only election veteran thinking about staffing the polls this fall. There has been talk in political circles in recent months about the need to recruit a new cadre of poll workers. In recent weeks, a handful of these efforts surfaced.
Washington's Fair Elections Center released an online poll worker sign-up tool that it hopes will help facilitate a national recruitment campaign. On June 30, a mix of businesses, corporate alliances, entertainment networks and nonprofits announced the "Power the Polls" coalition, whose goal is to recruit "250,000 new workers" using the WorkElections.com portal.
Other efforts include those by the Massachusetts-based Voter Protection Corps, a new advocacy group, working with We The Action, a nonprofit that enlists lawyers in civic projects and has been recruiting poll workers for Texas's July 14 primary runoff.
"Despite the challenges in recruiting poll workers presented by COVID, we've been pleasantly surprised by the interest from Texas lawyers serving as poll workers," said Paydon Miller, We The Action spokesman. "Dozens of lawyers have signed up to volunteer, and many others have indicated interest in helping in November."
"I do want to emphasize the big takeaway from this effort: states need to be planning now," he said. "Our experience is that lawyers stand prepared to help how they can, but if states and localities aren't thinking this through now, we may face the same challenges we've seen during the primaries: long lines, unclear voting laws, and voters turned away."
Staffing America's polls is a monumental task akin to deploying a civilian army one small squad at a time. In 2016's presidential election, nearly 110 million Americans voted in person at nearly 117,000 locations, according to a report from the Voter Protection Corps, "Keep the Polls Open: An Action Plan to Protect In-Person Voting and Voting Rights in the Era of COVID-19."
"More than 917,000 poll workers—sometimes known as election judges, booth workers, wardens, or commissioners—operated these sites. The EAC [U.S. Election Assistance Commission] has reported an average of between seven and eight poll workers per voting site consistently since 2012," the report said. "Urban areas have fewer polling locations per capita and are at greater risk of long lines and overcrowding in the event of poll closures and consolidation."
"If you think of the scope of the poll worker recruitment problem, it's almost as big as the decennial [U.S.] Census," said Quentin Palfrey, Voter Protection Corps chair. "In ordinary years, a lot of places have trouble recruiting poll workers. But during the pandemic, I think we are going to have massive shortfalls. And part of that is because more than 50 percent of poll workers, historically, have been over the age of 60. That population is going to be very reticent."
According to Sancho, the states that ran the smoothest recent elections (including the historic shift to voting from home) saw roughly three-quarters of their electorate vote by mail and one-quarter vote in person. He cited Iowa and Kentucky as examples. Should that ratio hold for the fall's general election, it means that hundreds of thousands of poll workers would be needed.
Historically, county-level officials—not political campaigns, political parties or activist groups—recruit poll workers, said Mike Firestone, co-author of the Corps' report. Those officials can be a county election supervisor, appointed election official, judge, or municipal clerk who hires poll workers and is responsible for their training. Individuals must apply to be poll workers, which isn't the same as being assigned by a political campaign or party to be a poll observer.
"There's a hodgepodge of rules that we only lightly touch on in the report that create a ton of different restrictions and criteria for who can serve," Firestone said. "In many, many cases, you need to be registered to vote in the jurisdiction where you're going to serve. There's a residency requirement plus an active voter status requirement. In some cases, you'll need to add onto that a party affiliation to fill a particular spot. So outside organizations, particularly political campaigns, have left this function to local government and really focused their own efforts to having observers at the polls to make sure people aren't getting disenfranchised or knocking on doors to get out the vote."
Filling Needed Ranks
Ryan Pierannunzi, Fair Elections Center's project manager for WorkElections.com's data and poll worker recruitment tool, said the portal seeks to help people sift through the application process. Individuals can find their state and county, view required local qualifications, access application forms (for students and non-students), and see their potential pay. The Work Elections portal also has contact information for local election officials.
"We're trying to team up with everyone who's interested," he said. "We just launched Power the Polls on June 30. We have a plan to reach out to a lot of different groups. One member of Power the Polls is Civic Alliance, which is made up of leading companies across the country. The Time to Vote coalition is part of that as well; they're committed to giving Election Day off for their employees… We have Comedy Central and MTV involved. Another big part of this is college students and young people. So we're working with groups like Students Learn Students Vote and other nonprofits to get the word out."
Some grassroots voting rights activists and organizers contacted by Voting Booth who have formidable field operations aimed at contacting voters in swing states and communities of color said they had heard some talk about potential poll worker campaigns, but not more than that.
"I have heard this as a strategy coming from several different corners. I haven't really seen anybody who's actually launched a detailed recruitment campaign other than occasional social media posts saying 'let's get more young people to apply' or people posting a link on how people can get involved," said Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund. "A real recruitment campaign—I haven't seen that. I know it's in the works from different groups… It's a potential strategy to deal with a key problem and also get younger people engaged in a different way."
The Black Voters Matter Fund is focusing on eight states, including mostly Southern states—like Florida, Georgia and North Carolina—as well as Pennsylvania. One of its partners is a voter contact operation targeting Southern states including Texas run by Andrea Miller of People Demanding Action, which has been sending hundreds of thousands of texts and postcards weekly since early 2020. She, too, said that she had not heard about a serious recruitment campaign—but was fully supportive.
"We have got to have our people inside the polls. Not just outside. So this is great," Miller said. "It would be interesting. How do we recruit poll workers? Where do they go? We are running phone banks and we are running text banks. We could easily work this in. What would we be asking people to do? How would we be telling them to go sign up?"
"There needs to be an activation process. Most people have no clue about this," said Gabriela Lemus, treasurer of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group. "They don't even know what poll workers do. When they go vote, they think, 'All these nice people. They must be volunteers.' Which they are. But the fact is it is a very organized system."
Sancho said he only heard about the Fair Elections Center's poll worker campaign in early July. The WorkElections.com portal was a good start but didn't go far enough, he said, based on years of experience recruiting registering voters and poll workers from Tallahassee's HBCU, Florida A&M University. During his tenure, those Black students helped turn Leon County's judiciary from a mostly all-white bench to having half of the elected judges be people of color.
The Work Elections portal will send voters to their state and county election websites, where they can access online applications and other information. But it doesn't collect follow-up information to assist people trying to apply to be a poll worker, Sancho said. It also doesn't walk students through the steps to update their voter registration information, so that they can be a poll worker in their county where they are attending school or now living—which may not be the same as their county of residence when they initially registered to vote. (Many states, like Georgia, require poll workers to be residents and registered voters in the county they will serve.)
Black Voters Matter's Albright agreed that specifics like these needed to be laid out.
"If you're just telling people to be a poll worker, but you are not laying out what that process is, then it's not going to happen. It's really that simple," he said. "You can tell people to be a poll worker. You can post a link that makes it easier for them to be a poll worker. You can post a link and give a somewhat detailed description of what this is really going to require of you."
Despite the constructive criticism, Sancho said the effort was achievable, especially in urban counties with large non-white populations that have seen some of the biggest poll closures in pandemic primaries. Leading examples include Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which went from 182 to five polling places in its April primary. Or Philadelphia, which closed 77 percent of its polls—600 locations. Or Las Vegas, which had only three in-person sites.
"Most of the urban supervisors have the training modules to be poll workers on the internet," Sancho said. "In Leon County, we do. If you're a first-time worker, they like to bring you into a training room. But after that, everything can be done online. You can review daily your tasks. And again, the people who are most likely to be able to use the internet on a regular basis are this target audience [younger people]. It's the older ones who have difficulty going on the internet to do the reviews."
"Training can be accomplished in a way that it couldn't have been 20 years ago if this pandemic had hit back then," he said. "They didn't have information on the internet. There was nowhere to go to remotely access it. It exists today."
Sancho reiterated that Trump's and the Republican Party's game plan for November appears to be attacking vote by mail now, while not discussing or planning to accommodate in-person voting—to sow Election Day chaos that would be used as pretext to file suits so that federal courts, or even the Supreme Court, would end up deciding winners. The GOP's operatives likely won't be as explicit as Trump, but instead cite more mundane reasons to create those conditions.
"A lot of what is happening is the poll worker shortage is becoming part of the rationale for polling place closures, particularly in communities of color," said Palfrey. "Even when it happens for reasons that are not nefarious, it has the effect of making it harder for folks to vote, and often the people it affects the most are historically disenfranchised groups."
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
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