Mother Jones
During his acceptance speech after winning reelection, President Barack Obama thanked voters who endured hours-long long lines to cast their ballots. “By the way,” he added, “we have to fix that.” Trying to make good on that promise, Obama created a presidential commission that spent months digging into the dysfunctional American voting system. One of its many conclusions was, to put it bluntly, that the nation’s poll workers suck. As the report noted, “One of the signal weaknesses of the system of election administration in the United States is the absence of a dependable, well-trained trained corps of poll workers.”
Poll workers, most of whom are volunteers (who typically receive a small stipend), have immense power that far surpasses their standing in the local election bureaucracy. They often make decisions about whether an individual can vote and whether that vote actually gets counted—recall the infamous Florida “hanging chads” during the 2000 presidential election recount. Often they make these decisions poorly, and the people who bear the brunt of those bad decisions are disproportionately African-American and Latino, who often face chronically understaffed polling stations that lack trained workers and those who are bilingual.
If things are running less than smoothly at your polling place today, here are five reasons why the poll workers at your precinct might be clueless:
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