I highly recommend becoming a poll worker in your community for the November election, and those to come. From my experience, they are always looking for additional volunteers (you do get paid but it’s average $9-15 and hour) since the main demographic for election workers are retired senior citizens. Elections are drawing in more and more people and it is overwhelming to a lot of the election workers, especially with the constant changes such as the influx in absentee ballots.

Becoming an election worker is quite simple. Go down to your city hall or municipal building (or send an email) and ask them if they are looking for volunteers for upcoming elections at YOUR polling location. They will have you come down, chat with them briefly, fill out employment papers and most likely get you signed up for some trainings. The trainings are not very time consuming.

Depending on the size of your community, they may ask you to come in the Saturday before an election to prep the Poll Books. This usually means logging in all of the absentee ballots that have been received and giving them a unique voter ID in the books. This does not mean purging voter roles, etc. That is supposed to been done ahead of time by the city clerk, I believe. However, these are great questions to ask when you become an election worker!

On Election Day, expect to be there for 16+ hours. Depending on how many election workers you have at your location you may work in shifts. However, my experience has been working the full duration due to a lack of volunteers. You’ll arrive typically at 6AM (1 hour before voting starts, sometimes earlier) to get set up and organized. During the set up is typically when everyone working decides, or is told, where they will be stationed. You’ll most always be paired up in groups of two or more.

Stations include (not all are listed below, just the key ones): New voter registration: This person needs to be familiar with local maps to determine if individuals are voting in the right place. Again, you’ll most likely be paired with an experienced worker, so it will be fine and you’ll learn quickly. Poll Book: This job is the most fast paced and critical. Highly recommend if you are younger and able to handle mildly stressful situations and distractions that you volunteer for this station. You will be responsible for verifying the voter has a valid photo ID and have them verbally confirm their name and address. Then you will need to find them in the poll book, give them a voter number and sign the book. It is EXTREMELY important to keep an organized poll book, ensuring the accurate voter numbers. If it is busy, recommend keeping small talk with the voters to a minimum so as not to get distracted and make a mistake in the book. You’ll be working with another individual who has a copy of the book and it is encouraged to state out loud the page number the voter is found on, along with the voter number for every voter. This helps keep both individuals on track. Ballot Distributor: This is the most laid back station. Your responsibility will be to hand out the ballots and explain how they are to vote; I.e. if it is a Partisian primary you tell them it is a one party ballot where if you cross over between parties your ballot will be rejected. Machine Supervisor: You’re responsible for making sure the counter takes each ballot and if something is wrong, you work to correct the issue. Either by seeing if the ballot was improperly filled out which caused the rejection or if it is a malfunction with the machine.This person will periodically check that the number of votes on the machine/s matches the number of voters in the poll book. This helps ensure accurate reconciliation at the end of the night and can make finding an error much easier if it is spotted early.

Once the polls close, expect to be there for 2+ hours. This process includes hand counting (at least where I’ve worked) the ballots to ensure the totals match the Poll Book and the vote tabulator, organizing the ballots, modeming the results to the respective location, printing out the voter roles from the machine, signing all documents, packing everything up, and cleaning up.

This is a great way to meet those in your community, get familiar with the process, have oversight, and do your part. Get out there, frens!