Shortage of polling staff may be near

WASHINGTON – A critical shortage of poll workers will develop around the nation unless younger people step in to take over for senior citizens who staff polling places now, elections officials said Monday.

In Baltimore, “If they’re breathing and they can walk, we have to take them,” said the city’s election director, Barbara Jackson.

In New Mexico, the average poll worker is 70 years old, said New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron.

While election administrators may scrape together the estimated 2 million workers needed Nov. 2, some workers will barely be up to the job and the shortage will only get worse as staff grow older, said witnesses at a hearing of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The independent federal agency distributes money and advice to states to help solve voting problems.

The aging of the polling staff worries election officials.

“One day, they will not be able to serve,” said Vigil-Giron, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, many of whose members administer elections in their states.

“It’s crucial that we work now to identify a new pool of poll workers with a sufficient educational background and knowledge of computers and technology,” Vigil-Giron said.

Commissioners and witnesses said college students could be recruited and businesses could ask workers to volunteer at the polls. But younger people aren’t as interested in working at the polls as their parents were, the officials said.

Encouraging employees to be poll workers is a foreign concept to most companies, said DeForest Soaries, the commission’s chairman.

“Many of them are afraid that it’s a partisan kind of thing,” Soaries said after the hearing. “They don’t understand it.”

Soaries wants companies to give employees Election Day off to work at the polls. He said the commission wrote to “every major corporation in the country” but that only about 12 companies were getting involved.

Officials said a lack of competent poll workers may be a major problem for elections.

“A lot of the other important reforms that are being implemented will mean not very much if there are not the people on the ground,” said Nancy Tate, executive director of the League of Women Voters.

Regulations defining qualifications to be a poll worker vary from state to state. In some but not all states, they must be of voting age. And some poll workers are required to live in the jurisdiction in which they work.

Federal law also can lead to differences in the composition of a polling place’s staff.

Jurisdictions with largely minority populations are required by the Voting Rights Act to take reasonable steps to supply bilingual poll workers.

And some states require a mix of Republican and Democratic poll workers – a major headache in heavily Democratic Baltimore, Jackson said.