For those accustomed to a lifetime of going to vote on Election Day and seeing a group of kindly (and, if it’s late) grumpy neighbors as poll workers, be prepared to see a bunch of fresh new faces at your local polling station come November.
To boost the election process this year, the U.S. government has provided grants to 27 colleges, universities and nonprofit organizations for the training and employment of poll workers under the U.S. Election Commission’s Help America Vote College Program.
The local fruit of this nationwide effort is the Dutchess County Citizen Action Network (DCCAN), which will be fielding over 200 Vassar, Marist and Dutchess Community College students as trained poll workers across the county. The brainchild of Sarita McCoy Gregory, an assistant professor of political science at Vassar, the non-partisan initiative is partnered with the Dutchess County Board of Elections.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is create excitement about democracy for a younger generation,” Gregory says about the program’s goals. “We’re trying to give a new face to the process, bring in new blood. This is the first time that this has been attempted in this area.”
The initiative grew out of a class that Gregory taught at Vassar last spring, titled “Democratic Engagement,” in which she gave her students an assignment to serve as poll watchers during the primaries. She stresses that poll watchers are to be distinguished from poll workers, as the former are partisan members of specific parties whose main task is to see that their fellow Democrats or Republicans are being treated fairly, and experience no difficulty voting. They cannot, however, electioneer anywhere near the polling station.
Poll workers, whom Gregory calls the “guardians of democracy,” are the handlers of the actual voting process, checking people’s names on the rolls, obtaining their signature before they vote, seeing that all is running in an orderly fashion. It is not the most glamorous job, and the tradition predominance of retirees at the polling stations is an indication that the election commission is always in need of workers. But not so much this year.
The initial phase of the DCCAN program began in August with the training of 12 students to serve as “campus fellows.” Each of these returned to their college seeking to recruit between 10 and 20 other students to serve as poll workers.
Gregory says that DCCAN has overshot its goal of training 200 students, and that the breakdown is approximately 120 from Vassar, 60 from Dutchess Community College, and 40 from Marist. She says that the variance is mainly due to the fact that Vassar is a residential college, and when the recruiting was done over the summer it was easier to contact people face-to-face.
One of the benefits of having young people as poll workers, according to Gregory, is that they are more familiar with technology, and with New York switching to new electronic voting machines this year, some older residents may be stumped as to how they function. The students also receive cultural sensitivity training, which includes dealing with handicapped people, who in the past have brought lawsuits against the federal government because they could not use the old lever voting machines.
As for the level of enthusiasm among her recruits, Gregory predicts that you won’t see many grumpy faces when you go to the polls this year.
“They are so excited to be a part of this project, to make democracy count,” she says. “They are happy to be the face of democracy.”