‘The face of our elections’: As November nears, Pennsylvania needs poll workers
Election officials are recruiting young people to work on Election Day.
Four years ago, election administrators across Pennsylvania and the nation were scrambling to recruit people to work at the polls.
It was a daunting task in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tens of thousands of people died in November 2020, and hospitalization rates were soaring.
Older Americans, who make up a large share of the country’s poll workers, were especially affected by COVID. Understandably, they wanted to remain at home instead of spending time with large crowds of people on a contentious Election Day.
Four years later, as Election Day 2024 approaches, election officials say there are not enough poll workers, though the situation isn’t as dire as it was in 2020.
“This is not a one-year problem; this is an ongoing problem, and, in many cases, this is because lots of poll workers have been doing it for many years, and so it’s an older group of folks,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, the executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan government watchdog group that runs a statewide program to educate and protect voters.
About 45,000 poll workers are needed to staff some 9,000 voting sites in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Elections administration is highly decentralized in Pennsylvania, which makes it difficult to know how many workers have currently signed up to work at the polls on Nov. 5 statewide. However, those recruiting poll workers say many more are needed.
“We need poll workers,” said Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley, a Democratic member of the three-person bipartisan board in charge of the city’s elections. “And the best thing about poll workers is they’re from your neighborhood. So they’re your neighbors. It’s neighbors helping neighbors to be able to exercise their right to vote.”
Elections cannot run without poll workers, explained Marta Hanson, the national program manager for Power the Polls, a nonpartisan group that’s leading efforts to recruit poll workers across the country. In Pennsylvania, bipartisan teams of poll workers spend long hours on Election Day doing everything from setting up voting machines and answering voters’ questions to handing out ballots and the coveted “I voted” stickers.
“Serving as a poll worker is one of the single most effective nonpartisan actions any of us can take in support of our democracy,” Hanson said. “If you care about voting, if you care about getting your community out to vote, you should care about poll workers. Poll workers are really the face of our elections.”
However, election administrators have found it increasingly difficult to find poll workers in recent years. Hensley-Robin said the long, tiring hours and low pay are discouraging younger people to sign up as older poll workers leave their positions.
“We also really in 2020 started to see a generational shift,” Hanson said. “And I think that’s the piece that is true and even magnified this year — of people saying, I served as a poll worker for 30 or 40 years, and now I’m ready to hang up my hat. I can’t work a 16-hour day anymore, and I really need to pass the baton to someone else.”
Officials in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, have successfully recruited thousands of poll workers this year after facing past shortages by paying them, Allegheny County spokesperson Abigail Gardner said. As of the end of August, the county had recruited 4,800 poll workers and needed about 2,000 more.
In Philadelphia, Deeley said, election officials are trying to recruit younger people with an initiative that encourages 17-year-old students to become poll workers. Seventeen-year-olds are able to serve as poll workers statewide as long as they receive permission from their school principal and their parent or guardian.
Hanson noted that Power the Polls recently had a group of their recruiters stationed at an Eagles training practice in Philadelphia to reach younger people.
This isn’t just a Pennsylvania issue. Hanson said that of the 1,800 jurisdictions her organization is monitoring nationwide, only 40% said they have enough poll workers.
“But then about 40% of them, election administrators have told us we are desperately in need of a lot of poll workers to step up,” Hanson said.
“In this ever-shifting political landscape, the one thing that will remain certain is that we will have an election on Nov. 5, and that it will take about one million temporary poll workers nationwide to greet voters at the polls,” Hanson continued.
To find out more about becoming a poll worker, visit https://www.pa.gov/en/services/vote/apply-to-become-an-election-poll-worker.html.
