Can Students Save Our Election Site Failures?

I don’t remember if I was inspired by an ad in the subway or a flyer at the doctor’s office, but shortly after my 18th birthday, I signed up to train to be a poll worker during the 2018 midterm elections in New York City. I skipped my Introduction to American Politics lecture and biked to the Oberia Dempsey Center in Harlem, prepared for a rigorous few hours of training, assessments, and a simulation of the “big day.” When I arrived, I was shocked to find myself in an overheated community center meeting room with only 5 other people; I was the youngest in the room by at least 30 years.

Many Americans have long believed that our polling sites are riddled with major problems. People still make jokes about the “hanging chad” ballots in the 2000 presidential elections in Florida, where thousands of ballots were not counted by the tabulation machines. While hanging chads are now no more than a Saturday Night Live punchline, flawed election systems continue to change the course of history. 

Recognizing this problem, President Barack Obama ordered a review of election procedures after long lines at the polls were a widespread issue in the 2012 election. The report that followed identified the training, recruitment, and number of poll workers as areas of concern. The commission that conducted the review emphasized that “one of the signal weaknesses of the system of election administration in the United States is the absence of a dependable, well-trained corps of poll workers.” 

Despite the release of that report in 2014, there were still complaints about long lines, unsecured voting technology, and, most notably, poll workers making errors in the 2016 election in New York City. New Yorkers were furious and sent local papers complaints. One New Yorker wrote to the Gothamist blog that the poll workers at PS 142 in Carroll Gardens were incorrectly instructing voters that they had to vote for all Democrats or all Republicans or the scanning machines would not accept their ballots. Susan Lerner, director of the advocacy group Common Cause, confirmed that this is one of many complaints she has heard about poll workers giving incorrect information to voters. “This is a poll worker training problem,” she told Gothamist. 

Because only 18 states allow poll workers to work for part of the day or split shifts (of what could otherwise be a 15-hour work day), elections officials are dependent on retirees to staff their sites. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found in 2018 that “less than one-fifth of poll workers were younger than 41 years old, whereas more than two-thirds were 61 years or older.” 

As new voting reforms such as electronic poll books are introduced, working at poll sites is only going to get more complicated. E-poll books were used by 36 states in at least one of their jurisdictions during the 2018 elections, a 48 percent increase since the 2016 elections. Last year, New York joined these states, rolling out a tablet-based system to search the voter rolls in lieu of hefty printed packets that required the voter’s physical signature.

Between inconsistent training of workers, lack of recruitment, and the introduction of necessary (but complicated) reforms, the current state of election sites is not just error-prone: it’s destined for chaos. Although having mostly older and retired poll workers is not inherently bad, it allows the Board of Elections to maintain an outdated status quo.

Last year, after I signed up to work at a polling site, on the day of the special election for Public Advocate in New York, my parents received a postcard in the mail with instructions on where I should show up to work. There was no information on the printout about what to bring, what to do if you were unable to report to work, or even where to find answers to these questions. When I later discovered that a midterm would preclude me from working, I contacted the Board of Elections to let them know. However, this information did not make it to the polling site where I was supposed to work at and I was marked as a “no-show.”

My Columbia-wired brain’s first instinct was to panic about how the absence would affect my record, but I quickly realized that the much bigger problem is that the majority of these sites are staffed with the exact number of workers they need with no surplus for backup. Further, New York regulations mandate that each polling location have an even split between Republicans and Democrats working at each district's table. Too many absences could drive the polling site into a crisis.

Formalizing the recruitment of high school students and young people to work at polling sites would not only increase the efficiency of these sites but also translate into increased civic engagement and broader knowledge about the democratic process. Across the nation, news outlets and political operatives try and fail to explain why young people vote in such low numbers. In an interview with The Hill, pollster Dan Cox said that many young people don’t come out to vote because they don’t think they know enough about the process. Fifteen hours of flipping through voter rolls, meeting voters, and directly engaging with the most basic part of democracy is a great way to discover what the rest of that process entails.

The number of states declaring Election Day an official holiday is growing; with schools closing in recognition of the holiday, more students will have the opportunity to work at poll sites.

Many cities, towns, and counties have already taken initiative to get young people involved at election sites. Various forms of youth poll worker programs exist in 45 states already, and are even being run in conjunction with high schools. Counties and high schools taking this initiative is the first step, but these programs should be codified and creatively encouraged at the state and national levels, too.

In the 2018 elections, for the second year in a row, the City of Boston Election Department collaborated with the Boston public school system to allow sixty students to work at election sites across the city. Many of the students that participated were able to act as language interpreters for voters who were not fluent in English. Helping non-English speakers understand how to navigate a polling site is an invaluable contribution on its own. As we head into another election season that has already been plagued by election site failures, the success of this program and similar ones should be reason enough to formalize and implement a program nationally.

There are hundreds of small vulnerabilities that make running a smooth election almost impossible, but a consistently well-trained and adaptable force of poll workers is a necessary first step in improving our elections. Beyond having the potential to dramatically increase the efficiency of our elections, encouraging young citizens to be engaged at the polls is critical to the future of democracy.

Gustie Owens is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore at Barnard College studying Urban Studies and Anthropology. She is from New York City.