Richland poll workers who signed up after June primary fear another election breakdown
Feeling called to civic action by the “disaster” that was the Richland County primary election this past June, CJ Tamasco signed up to be a poll worker for the November general election the very next day.
She’d read coverage of the severe poll worker shortage that had forced county officials to combine numerous polling sites, overwhelming precincts and creating hours-long lines that left some voters waiting as late as midnight to cast ballots, and wanted to ensure nothing like that would happen in November.
With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, however, Tamasco remains concerned about the possibility of a primary repeat and said her experience dealing with the Richland County Elections and Voter Registration office the past four months has left her — and many of her friends who signed up to be poll workers — feeling incredibly frustrated.
“A really big disconnect for us is how many times we’ve heard that Richland is in desperate need of its citizens to step up and become poll workers to avoid a mess in November,” Tamasco wrote in a Sept. 10 email to state and local lawmakers in which she expressed her concerns about the experience.
“It’s hard not to feel gaslit when all throughout this process, I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for any scrap of information about the status of my application (and my friends’) when so much of this could be solved with clear and consistent communication.”
Tamasco and multiple other first-time poll workers who spoke to The State this month about their experiences described a disorganized and disjointed process that required considerable time and initiative to navigate and has not adequately prepared them to work the polls on Election Day.
“The whole process is just alarming,” Tamasco said. “At every turn, I’ve had to ask what the next step is.”
South Carolina Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said his office had received complaints from prospective Richland County poll managers who reported not being contacted by elections officials after applying to work and consistently having trouble reaching elections staff.
He said such complaints have been common in Richland County since before current elections director Alexandria Stephens’ tenure and partially attributed the consolidation of polling locations in June to elections officials’ failure to implement a process for communicating, training and assigning poll workers.
Whitmire said his office had been in touch with Stephens about those issues over the past couple months and believed she was committed to working on fixes.
“Even if a poll manager is not being used, you need to reach out to them and thank them for their application, just so they hear something,” he said. “If you are using them, they need to know, ‘Thank you, you’ll be contacted soon about your options for training.’ That had been an issue in the past as far as communication with poll managers. The director is aware of it, she’s communicated to us that she’s taken steps to improve that process.”
Speaking to The State on Thursday, Stephens said the elections office had been inundated with new poll worker inquiries even before she started in July and has been playing catch up with a small staff, including newly hired temporary workers, ever since.
She said she was cognizant of Richland County’s history of election mishaps and has been working to increase her office’s transparency and restore residents’ faith in its operations.
Stephens said significant work would be necessary to revamp the office, and acknowledged much of that would not happen until after Election Day, but promised she’d focus heavily on reforming the elections infrastructure after Nov. 3.
“We had a few hiccups in the beginning (of absentee in-person voting), but everything is going smoothly now,” she said. “And moving forward, I want to change a lot more. I want to make this an easy process for the voters and for my staff as well.”
Stephens said her office had assigned about 2,170 poll managers to work on Nov. 3 and had another 550 reserve workers who could be deployed on Election Day, if needed.
About 600, or roughly 35%, of the assigned poll managers are first-timers, and all of the reserves are, she said.
Stephens, who in September told The State her goal was to deploy 1,800 poll managers on Election Day, said at an elections board meeting last week that she’d ramped up assignments “just to be on the safe side,” due to the number of workers who had dropped out in recent days.
She said at the meeting that the county had enough poll workers for Nov. 3, but encouraged anyone interested in working future elections to sign up.
Duncan Buell, a University of South Carolina professor who specializes in election technology and serves as vice chair of Richland County’s elections board, told The State he hadn’t heard any concerns from first-time poll managers, but acknowledged it was likely very difficult for the elections staff to respond quickly to the outpouring of inquiries they had received from people interested in serving.
“I know the staff had been working and had been answering calls, but it’s also true they have been swamped with people volunteering,” he said. “From everything I’ve been told, the staff has been making many, many, many, many phone calls and working with people.”
Buell said he thought the county was doing “about as well as one could expect” in preparing for what is likely to be a huge turnout on Election Day and expressed the utmost confidence in Stephens, an experienced elections official from Alabama who was hired shortly after the June primary debacle.
“Yes, it’s possible there will be problems,” on Election Day, he said. “But I think Alexandria is doing just about everything that is necessary to make sure this comes off successfully.”
Communication point of frustration
Three first-time poll workers who spoke to The State said their biggest issue has been an inability to get clear answers, or often any answers, from Richland elections officials despite their repeated attempts to contact them.
They tell a similar story of answering the county’s call to serve as poll workers out of a desire to ensure that Richland avoids the sorts of problems that have so frequently plagued the county on Election Days past, but feeling left in the dark throughout the process.
The volunteer poll workers reported receiving no confirmation email when they applied to be poll managers and being unsure if their application had been received or was being processed. Months later, and often after having to follow up multiple times, they were instructed to submit employment paperwork, but given no indication it had been successfully processed or notified about next steps.
Lauren Haynes said she followed up a week after submitting her employment paperwork because she hadn’t heard anything and was informed only after she inquired that there had been a problem with what she had submitted and told she needed to resend it.
Tamasco said she made an appointment to fill out employment information, but was told when she arrived at the elections office that the person she needed to see was not in the office and she would need to return later.
“They put this call out and said there was this shortage of poll workers and made it seem like it was very important,” said Kate Blanton, who applied to be a poll manager in June. “Yet when people come forward and want to help and are excited and energized, they can’t get the information they need to be successful. And that’s super frustrating.”
After applying online in June, Blanton said she heard nothing until early August, when she was asked to come in and fill out employment paperwork. She filled out the documents, but heard nothing further, so on Sept. 29, five weeks from the election, she reached out again to ask about next steps.
The next day she said she received an emailed response telling her that information about training would be forthcoming, and was given an account ID and password to use for online poll manager training.
Blanton has started the online training, which consists of self-directed video modules, but said she had yet to hear anything about the in-person or Zoom training that is required for all first-time workers.
She followed up Monday to ask about in-person training and about obtaining the poll worker handbook she was supposed to reference during her online training, but had not received. She said Wednesday that she had yet to hear back.
“I’m a pretty patient person,” Blanton said. “But we’re at the point where we’re 3-4 weeks away from the election. I should know what I’m doing by now, or at least have an idea. I think the call for volunteers is not matching up with the expectation for communicating with those volunteers.”
Not all people who inquired about working the polls in November had received responses, but all would hear from the elections office after the election, when employees have more time on their hands, Stephens told The State.
She said the outpouring of interest in working the election reflected highly on Richland County residents, and that while she would have liked to respond to everybody, at a certain point, it was necessary to shift focus to training the workers who would be needed on Nov. 3.
Stephens said she wished there had been an automated system in place to respond to applicants and help walk them through the process, but that “time was ticking” and there just wasn’t enough of it to properly set one up in this case.
She said the county had never before received such a rush of interest in working the polls like it did after the June primary and that in the past staff had always been able to adequately manage inquiries through email.
“In the past it may have worked, but now that things have changed, we have to regroup and revamp and come up with a better system moving forward,” Stephens said. “We will definitely do that. I don’t want anyone to feel as if they are overlooked or just not considered.”
First-time poll workers felt unprepared
Even when the Richland County elections office has contacted and successfully onboarded poll worker applicants, training has emerged as another area of concern, some said.
Haynes, a friend of Tamasco’s who attended a Zoom training for poll managers last week, described the experience as a “huge mess.”
The 2 1/2-hour training, which Haynes and Tamasco both attended, was led by a presenter who never identified herself by name and rushed through slides with little explanation, Tamasco said.
Attendees who connected to the training through Zoom were unable to hear or make sense of large portions of the training because it was delivered primarily to an in-person audience while being streamed simultaneously using the video communications software, both said.
“The presenter would engage with the in-person group and get off on tangents or answer questions we couldn’t hear or make sense of on the virtual call,” Haynes said.
When the Zoom attendees asked via chat for someone to clarify what was being discussed, they were told it was too difficult to keep up or convey the information, she said.
Both Haynes and Tamasco said elections officials spent a portion of the training venting about not having the appropriate electronic pollbook technology and being unsure if there would be time to train poll workers on it once it arrives.
“It was very unprofessional,” said Haynes, who lamented that she left the training feeling more stressed and unsure about her Election Day duties than she was going in.
Stephens said training has been a challenge because the pandemic has made it difficult to secure spaces large enough to hold the substantial group of trainees. Elections officials are using Zoom to accommodate new poll workers and get the training done in a timely fashion, but the sessions are admittedly a work in progress, she said.
“We had to improvise,” Stephens said. “So we’re improvising and working through some kinks. This is new.”
She advised any trainees who don’t feel like they know what they’re doing to reach out to her office, but said she’s confident new poll workers will rise to the challenge on Election Day.
“I do feel confident that the new workers will go out there and do a great job because they will be working alongside seasoned poll workers,” Stephens said. “They’ll be working alongside people who have done this for many, many years.”
Since every polling place is required to have a clerk, and clerks are required to have had experience working the polls, she said there were guaranteed to be seasoned people at every location to help first-timers.
Veteran poll worker encourages patience
Nancy Brock, who has been a Richland County poll manager for 35 years and serves as assistant clerk — second in command — at her polling place, said she understood the frustration first-time poll managers might feel about the process, but advised them to be patient.
A significant amount of work goes into training and assigning poll workers under normal circumstances, but it’s especially taxing for the skeleton crew of elections officials to prepare for an election amid a global pandemic that has limited the ability to train workers in person and substantially altered the voting process, she said.
“I can understand why these people are frustrated, but they must take into consideration that there are certain precautions and logistics that have to be dealt with before they can receive an assignment, where to work and where to train,” she said.
Brock said the online training modules are great, but that even with the best possible training, workers will have to do a significant amount of learning on the job.
She recommended that first-timers arrive on time and seek out veteran poll managers for guidance on Election Day. Processing voters quickly is the priority, Brock said, but when experienced poll managers have time they are usually happy to mentor rookies.
“It’s one of those cases where you really need to experience an election before you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Because sometimes everything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Tamasco said she sure hopes all first-time poll managers are paired with veterans on Election Day because otherwise, “it’s going to be bad.”
“It would be a travesty if we get to Nov. 3 and this is a mess,” she said.
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 1:17 PM.