New year, new elections, and the Iowa caucuses are – gasp – less than 24 hours away. Take down your Christmas tree and put away your party hats, because the holidays are over and it’s time to get down to presidential primary business. And we are busy.
Among many preparation activities, we’re in the throes of recruiting a cast of thousands to help ensure our polling places run smoothly on Feb. 5.
We need 2,000 poll workers to man 448 precincts from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Election Day. We’ve got 1,633 assigned so far and we’re expecting at least 300 student poll workers to join them through our democracyLIVE! 2008 program.
“What we really need are more people to come up and say, ‘Yeah, I’m interested in doing this,’” said Greta McElroy-White, who is in charge of poll worker recruiting and training. “November and this election so far has been slimmer pickins than it usually is. With the new requirements older people are retiring we and need younger people, more flexibile people.”
Poll workers themselves are busy signing up for training – we’re holding about 65 classes this month for poll workers to bone up on procedures for the primary. We’re also offering a winter session of our one-of-a-kind Poll Worker Academy, which gives poll workers eight hours of intensive instruction devoted to the technical mastery of our eSlates. Six hundred poll workers graduated in August from our summer session.
Almost 850 poll workers have already signed up for training; if you’re a poll worker – or want to be one – and haven’t done so yet, signup today! (For November’s election we began offering training signups online to make life a little easier.)
