Lucas County (OH) May Need Poll Workers, But This Is Not How to Get Them

A Sunday Toledo Blade editorial suggested a possible cure for the difficulty in recruiting Election Day poll workers:

IN AN effort to make the voting process a civic pleasure instead of a problem, Jill Kelly, Lucas County’s elections director, has come up with a sensible plan for increasing the availability of well trained poll workers. Why city and county officials aren’t eager to put the program into effect is a puzzlement.

Ms. Kelly’s plan calls for allowing local government workers to act as poll judges on Election Day without having to sacrifice vacation, personal days, or other paid time off in order to perform this badly needed public service.

It wouldn’t mean a free day off work for public employees who volunteered as poll workers. They would be required to undergo the normal three hours of training, help prepare polling places the evening before Election Day, and put in at least 14 hours supervising voting. For their work, they would receive the nominal sum of $95, or $105 if they served as presiding judges.

This seems like a sensible solution to the continuing lack of poll workers, which is being felt not just in Lucas County but in virtually every other county in Ohio and across the nation.

Senior citizens, who once provided the bulk of poll workers, now seem less enthusiastic about the job. Some are computer-phobic in this era of touch-screen voting machines, while others are increasingly likely to be out of town when elections roll around in the fall and spring.

In just the month before last November’s election, Lucas County unexpectedly lost the services of about 500 workers who had signed up, leading to a shortage of trained personnel to help voters at the polls.

I don’t like the answer.

Let’s start with the obvious: Many, if not most, public workers get perks that those in the private sector can only dream of, among them “personal days” and “accumulated sick time.” I be willing to go as far as letting public employees burn a personal or sick day to work at the polls, but that’s it. Many public employees build up embarrassing numbers of personal and sick days by the the time they retire anyway.

Second, the pay is ridiculous. Civic duty is fine, but for roughly 18 hours of work, poll workers end up getting what works out to be $5.50 or so an hour and a brutally long day. Bumping pay up by 20% or so wouldn’t cost that much, and would go a long way towards not only recruiting more people and reducing the no-show rate.

Finally, in Toledo, of all places, I’m pretty sure there should be no shortage of available poll workers on Election Day. At least as of a few years ago, UAW workers at Ford and GM got Election Day off with pay (it must take all day to vote, you see), and I assume they still do. The Toledo area has at least one significant Ford plant (now Visteon, I believe, but the union contract is essentially the same). GM just announced a big expansion of its transmission plant in Toledo. I know less about Chrysler, but would think that UAW workers at the huge Jeep plant there also get Election Day off with pay. This is not a very smart situation for the “Big Three” car companies to be in while their foreign transplant competitors don’t observe the same practice, but as long as it’s in place, there are a lot of people not working on Election Day.

That’s a pool of probably 20,000 poll workers who are already getting a paid holiday. I would suggest that Lucas and surrounding Metro Toledo counties make attempts to recruit from those ranks first.