About 200 novel Republican poll workers were appointed last week to assist run polling places in Philadelphia, alarming some veteran workers who fear that an influx of untrained, last-minute workers could create chaos on Election Day.
During a hearing in a City Hall courtroom on Oct. 23, a judge appointed people to fill hundreds of technically vacant positions. Most of the vacancies were intended for “minority inspectors,” who are part of the five-person teams that will check voters and supervise voting machines in each of the city’s 1,703 precincts on Nov. 5.
While such hearings are held before every election, not since 2016 have so many nominations been held at once, said Lisa Deeley, vice president of the City Commission, which organizes the city’s elections.
In 2020, she said, the pandemic reduced interest in working at the polls, and in other years, less significant elections for state and local offices involved significantly fewer nominations.
The resulting mass hiring came as a surprise and a “shock” to some workers, including election judges who serve as team leaders, said Dan Rennie, an elections board official who attended the hearing.
He said Republican lawmakers asked to fill 255 positions and the city objected to four that were already filled. The City Commissioner’s Office said 198 auditions were held, but no final number of nominations was released.
He said Rennie’s Fishtown branch will get a novel minority affairs inspector who will also be able to appoint someone to the clerk position.
“We have had a cohesive team in the last four or five elections. The same people worked in these positions each time,” he said. If the new minority affairs inspector brings a friend to work as an official, “we will eliminate two people with experience in favor of two people who have potentially never even taken part in the training.”
Both parties want to maintain confidence in the elections
Given efforts to disrupt voting across the country, both recently and during the 2020 presidential election, some have expressed concern that the nominations are part of an attempt to end the process in Philadelphia.
“From what I hear, this has been orchestrated by all Republicans and it’s a very restrained effort,” said Brenda Hebert, a Democrat who served for four years as an elections judge in District 15, Department 15, in the West Spring Garden area. She stepped down from her position earlier this year. “From my experience as a JOE and from my paranoia as a voter and citizen of this country, especially with Philadelphia being ground zero, this could be trouble.”
“I want people to be able to vote and I don’t want anyone to leave the line because they don’t trust the process,” said Fishtown Elections Judge Jessica O’Neill. “I also don’t want anyone’s vote to be rejected because of confusion or an attempt to disenfranchise people. That’s what I’m most concerned about.”
But Matt Wolfe, a Republican lawyer who recruited some of the novel staff and participated in last week’s hearing, argued that the appointments actually serve the purpose of encouraging people to vote.
“Will Republicans have confidence in the electoral process if there are no Republicans on the election boards?” he asked. “That’s why state law is what it is, to ensure that both parties are represented on each county board of elections. It’s a good system. Reduces the possibilities of fraud. It provides certainty in the electoral process.”
Wolfe, who is also West Philly’s Republican precinct leader, noted that “voter fraud is not a serious problem” (even though Donald Trump’s false claims and some of his followers that it is spreading throughout Pennsylvania).
“But with that being said, the best way to prevent this from becoming a major problem is to watch the process,” Wolfe said.
Deeley said poll workers’ concerns about the deluge of nominations are understandable. But she said they were perfectly legal and urged teams to do their best once they and novel workers arrive at polling stations before 7 a.m. next Tuesday.
“If people come, the court has authorized them to stay. They have the right to be there,” she said. “To start with, it’s a long day. It takes longer if people argue with each other. So introduce yourself and get ready for 14 hours of work.”
If all else fails, hold curbside elections
Each district is to have a five-member election commission, which means there could be about 8,500 election commission workers across the city if all positions are filled.
Three of these positions are to be filled by election. These are the election judge – the manager of the polling station and other employees – the majority inspector and the minority inspector. The minority inspector comes from the party that won the second most votes in the district in the last November elections. In mostly Democratic-dominated Philadelphia, it’s the Republican Party.
The minority inspector also appoints a clerk, and city commissioners appoint a machine inspector who installs voting machines and instructs voters how to operate them.
While election judges and inspectors are supposed to be elected by voters in regular elections, often no one runs, especially in the case of a minority inspector. Many of the city’s wards – larger political subdivisions with multiple wards – don’t even have a Republican ward committee to recruit and manage candidates.
If a polling station is vacant on Election Day or no one shows up at the polling place to do the job, there are various ways to make sure the job gets done.
For example, according to a guide on the City Commissioners’ website, the election judge can simply choose the majority inspector and vice versa. Any registered voter of any party can be recruited on the spot, on the morning of Election Day, by a show of hands of voters present. This is called curbside voting.
However, Deeley and Wolfe say the positions can also be filled at the Court of Common Pleas hearings that take place before each election.
Elections judges may feel like experienced members of their panels have been unexpectedly reassigned in favor of random newcomers, but Wolfe said he and the other attorneys followed the standard, common legal filing process to fill the vacancies.
“We did it in the spring. We did it last fall. We did it the spring before. We do it every year,” Wolfe said. “Sometimes [Republican] The City Committee carries out broader activities. “It was a little bit broader this time, but I think in the past we have probably reported 300 votes in one election cycle.”
Untrained and blurry on the morning of Election Day?
Election judges are paid $205 to work on Election Day, while the other four positions earn $200.
If they took part in the classes, they receive additional remuneration training — $50 for standard training and $30 for review of the novel iPad-style electronic ballot books that commissioners introduced last year to check voters.
City commissioners have been offering training sessions for months and will continue them this week, both in person and online. But they cannot require workers to be present, and in some places untrained inspectors and perhaps even election judges will take their positions for the first time Tuesday morning.
Hebert, a former election judge, said she worked with the city commissioners’ office to select a trained successor. But now it turns out that he will be the majority inspector, and the judge is a novel person, unknown to the other team members, she added.
This is “scary because JOE has enormous power over everything that happens at the polling station,” she said. “JOE signs all the tickets that come out of the machine. JOE is responsible for the process of enabling voters to vote. I don’t know what exactly JOE could do [to disrupt voting]but I know that they have the last word in every matter.
Rennie said he believed his team was experienced enough to address any issues that would arise from having an untrained person.
However, he also noted that they would be working under tight time constraints. They will arrive around 6:10 a.m. to prepare the room and machines, and people will be lining up to start voting at 7:00 a.m. If the inspector doesn’t show up, rules say the panel must wait until 7:30 a.m. to hold a nasty election to fill the position, which could create a growing backlog of anxious voters, he said.
He said that in a Facebook group for city election workers where he shared news of the hearing, others had similar concerns.
“Nobody really cares whether a Republican works or not. We just want to make sure everything runs smoothly,” he said. “If we find a replacement, but he is fully trained and knows what he is doing, it will not bother anyone. But it’s all the unknowns in the busiest of elections that have everyone worried.”
Wolfe responded that there is still time to train novel employees and that the issues Rennie and others worry about come up every election.
“Everyone has done it for the first time,” he said. “It’s not a perfect system. There are people who don’t show up every year. Some novel people won’t show up. Some people who have been coming for six years won’t show up.
“There are people who are not trained every year and do a bad job every year,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons we try to have good people on our boards.”
