Poll Workers and Election Administration: The View from Local Election Officials

In this paper, we report the first results of a survey of local election officials in the United States. The survey includes several questions about how poll workers were recruited, trained, evaluated and compensated in the 2008 presidential election. With a highly decentralized system of election administration in the United States, there are dramatic differences in the number of voters served by different local jurisdictions. We find that highly populated jurisdictions face acute needs for poll workers while small jurisdictions have very little demand for poll workers. Consequently, large jurisdictions tend to take a more critical view of their poll worker operations. In addition, large jurisdictions engage in more extensive efforts to recruit, train and evaluate poll workers. Finally, election officials in large jurisdictions are more supportive of reforms that might reduce the demand for poll workers or make it easier to hire more poll workers. We discuss the implications of these findings in the conclusion