So many questions about how to manage ballots
— Rachel Goddard, friend to CCD and long-time New York City poll worker
November 2018
Better training for poll workers in in New York City would have been a good idea…and would have made Election Day 2018 less stressful for everyone.
I’ve been a poll worker for 20 elections. I’ve taken the training class 9 times. The training has gotten better over the years, but none of it helps if our training doesn’t accurately reflect the Election Day in-the-polls reality.
Elections require hundreds of teams for one (long) day. My polling place has teams of poll workers running 6 election districts. Between Inspectors, Poll Clerks, Information Clerks, Accessibility Clerks and extra poll workers to cover during breaks, that’s a lot of people who all have to work together to keep the lines moving.
We shouldn’t have to make up procedures — and we don’t have time to coordinate during a busy day.
Just 3 days before the election, I got a call from my site coordinator telling us to look up a training video online because (surprise!) the ballots were going to be different than in the past.
I tried to watch the video on the Board of Elections website, but it was nowhere to be found. I did find a news story that explained that the ballot was two pages that would need to be separated before they could be scanned. And another story that said the video had been removed because it not only showed a ballot marked for one of the candidates, but also an overvote.
I never got to see the video. And we poll workers never got any information about how to handle these new 2-page ballots. Considering how far in advance ballots go to print, there is really no excuse. Some guidance from the Board of Elections would have been helpful.
Never explained: Whether or not poll workers (called table inspectors) should separate the ballots when handing them to voters. In my polling place, some inspectors pre-separated the ballots, especially for elderly voters. Others did not, for fear that this would be considered “tampering” with a ballot, or that one of the two pages might get lost.
Never explained: What procedure we should follow if a voter successfully scanned one page but the scanner wouldn’t accept the second page. Our scanners are programmed to warn voters if they have overvoted (marked more candidates than allowed) or have stray marks on the page. Voters who want to make a correction can get a new one. Presumably, the poll workers should give the voter only the page that needed revision, voiding the unused half of the ballot. But we had no procedures for that…and no instructions for how to reconcile the ballot count at the end of the night.
I spent the day kicking the scanners to un-jam them, helping voters deal with damp ballots, and desperately trying to keep the lines of voters waiting to scan their ballots separate from the ones waiting for a privacy booth (a Sisyphean task if there ever was one).
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time poll workers were not given the information we needed to serve voters. During training, we are told over and over to “Read your manual.” But the things that go wrong during Election Day never seem to be in the manual.
Primary elections have their own complications because in New York only voters registered with a party can participate in that party’s primary. This year, for some reason, we had both Reform ballots, and Reform Unaffiliated ballots, but no information at all about who should get the which one, or why the abbreviation for the Reform Party is BLA. No, that was not explained in our manual. I checked.
None of the voters who had “BLA” next to their name in our voter registration book had ever heard of the Reform party. To a one, they insisted they had tried to change their party affiliation to Democrat ahead of the primary — some saying they had tried several times. We gave them Reform ballots when they were willing to take them, but we gave out a lot of Democrat affidavit ballots that day.
In addition to the manuals, our training includes hands-on practice setting up the scanners and the ballot marking devices. There are also videos about how best to serve the needs of voters with various accessibility needs. This year’s were some of the best I’ve seen on the topic in all my years of training — certainly an improvement over the trainer in 2011 who actually told us there was no point teaching us about any of the hardware for the BMD such as the sip and puff and rocker paddle since “no one uses these anyway”
What this demonstrates to me is that the BOE has the capacity to improve their training and poll site procedures. Although the training has vastly improved over the last 8 years, this primary and general Election had some pretty glaring omissions.
Poll workers get a lot of flak for incompetence. But there is only so much we can do when the Board of Elections will not train us adequately or when the procedures don’t work well in the realities of managing too many people in too small a space. Poor training makes it hard for us to do our work and our work is making sure that voters are able to cast a ballot that accurately states whom they wish to elect. If we don’t know how to help, the voters are the ones who lose.
