When things go awry at the voting booth, as they have several times in this hectic primary season, much of the blame often falls on ill-trained poll workers who are paid a pittance.
And there have been some head-scratching moments: While folks in Washington were waiting hours to vote under record turnout Feb. 12, poll workers hid electronic voting machines because they didn’t like the touch-screen devices. On Super Tuesday in Chicago, poll workers passed out pens meant for e-voting machines. When those instruments made no mark on paper ballots, election workers said they were full of invisible ink - an explanation that was upheld by onsite precinct judges.
While some of these snafus defy logic, many can be pinned on poor training, experts say.
“We’re running the most important part of our democracy on the backs of untrained, poorly paid volunteers,” said Lloyd Leonard, who has helped research poll worker issues for the League of Women Voters. “It’s not their fault. Funding is not a priority. They aren’t paid much. They try real hard. We should all volunteer and help them out.”
Bell County poll workers don’t seem to have the sorts of problems other areas in the country are having.
“We have never had any problems,” said Jana Henderson, Bell County election clerk. “We have never had problems with equipment and we do our own programming. We have never had any problems with our poll workers. We’ve had the same ones for years and years.”
Every year in July the political parties get together and appoint a judge for each of the 49 polling locations, Henderson said. They remain in that position from July one year to July the next. There isn’t even a shortage of volunteers, she said.
The Bell County judges are responsible for hiring their clerks. Henderson has been in the job for four years and is thankful and fortunate to have stability in the area.
“Unless someone moves out of the area we have the same people every year. We always give two or three training classes for the clerks, just so they know what they are doing,” she said.
“We always try to put new people with people that they know and with experienced people,” she said. “We try to make it as easy as possible for them.
“The people we have are easygoing and usually enjoy their work.”
That seemed to be the case at the Bell County Annex in Temple on Saturday afternoon. Workers there said they enjoyed what they were doing. All felt they had received adequate training and hadn’t had problems during early voting.
“We have a well-oiled machine, for lack of a better term,” Henderson said. “Our voters like paper voting so we don’t have machines.”
Nationwide, there are an estimated 2 million poll workers, the largest one-day work force in the country, according to research published in September by electionline.org, a project of the Pew Center on the States.
Many have only a few hours of training and earn an average of $100 for working up to 16 hours on Election Day or 40 cents more an hour than the federal minimum wage, the survey said.
There are no national standards for training poll workers, and compensation is determined by states and local election boards. “Low pay, absenteeism, and morale continue to be challenges,” the study said.
Added disincentives include serving a public whose members can turn cranky and impatient when kept waiting.
In an intensely competitive primary season with record turnout and an ever-changing landscape of election rules, being a poll worker has rarely been more difficult, according to election advocates.
Additionally, voters overwhelmed state primaries and caucuses, creating long lines and confusion in places such as Honolulu, where nearly 40,000 Democrats showed up Tuesday to choose home son Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2004, the number of Democratic caucus voters was 4,000.
Most Feb. 12 primary problems concerned running out of ballots, which happened at least twice at polling places in Bell County. Ballots were quickly replenished.
