When we spoke a few weeks ago, Marlbrough said his organization had recruited around 750 poll workers, many of them students at Atlanta’s public and historically Black colleges and universities. Most of the recruiting comes from the absolute best place to find young people in 2020: Instagram. The organization promises to help place volunteers where they’re needed, get them hired, and make sure they get paid.
Marlbrough said his pitch to potential recruits combines civic duty with practical self-interest. “Our approach is that we tie poll working to the basic voter issues we see every election,” he said. “Every election we see five-hour wait times. Every election we see communities not have enough polling sites. Those are specifically tied to staffing. So we bring it home for them. And then we also say, ‘Hey, not only that, there’s a financial incentive for you to help fix this issue, so why wouldn’t you?’”
The pandemic ads extra urgency to those issues. It’s hard to put exact numbers on the Covid-induced poll worker shortage, but if unaddressed, the number would likely be at least in the tens of thousands. In the Washington, DC, primary, for example, 1,700 of about 2,000 workers dropped out. But election administration is a state and local enterprise, and each jurisdiction is different. Plus, it’s impossible to predict how many volunteers will show up come Election Day (plus early voting days), and how many will cancel at the last minute.
Fortunately, the Georgia Youth Poll Worker Project is only one of several efforts spearheaded by young people to stave off an Election Day catastrophe by recruiting their peers to staff the polls. I recently spoke ..
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