The few, the tough, the election officers
Ivy Main
2007-10-09 19:19:22
Wanted: civic-minded people with the stamina of a 70-year-old to work the polls this Election Day.Actually, make that a 72-year-old, the average age of election workers in the United States, according to the Election Assistance Commission. The aging of this workforce has created a huge problem for registrars, who are charged with recruiting new election officers to serve a growing population even as their experienced workers retire in ever-larger numbers.
According to Jackie Harris, the General Registrar for Fairfax County, the county needs hundreds of new election officers every year. And finding these volunteers gets harder with each November. It’s not that people are less civic-minded than in the past, says Harris, it’s that they have less time.
“The women who are now in their 70s and 80s started serving as election officers at a time when most women didn’t hold jobs,” she says. Today registrars have to target a broader demographic. “We have more men now, which is great, but even so we are always short of volunteers.”
The job description scares off some people. Workers arrive at the precincts at 5 a.m. to set up; polls are open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., and then closing the polls takes another hour and a half. For this 15-plus hours, Fairfax County pays $100, an amount that is real money in some parts of the state, but chicken feed in Northern Virginia. (You can do the math to figure out the hourly wage, but I don’t recommend it.)
What the workers get – and what keeps so many of them coming back – is the enormous satisfaction of playing a critical role at the very heart of the democratic process. Greeting friends and neighbors who’ve taken the time to come vote, helping them through the process, and talking with people who are equally committed to the functioning of our democracy, make for a powerful tonic to counteract the cynicism with which so many of us have come to view the American electoral process.
No wonder all those 70-somethings keep coming back every year to be election officials. Think you might have the stamina to join them? Call the office of the Fairfax County Registrar at 703-324-4735 or go to the county Web site at www.fairfaxcounty.gov and click on “Citizenship and voting.”
On second thought, if the average age is 72, then a whole lot of these poll workers are older. You might want to shoot for the stamina of an 80-year-old, just to be on the safe side.
Ivy Main is the policy director of the New Electoral Reform Alliance for Virginia, and an election officer in McLean.