Thousands of Bay Area Poll Workers Are Trained and Ready for the 2024 Election

Bay Area election offices are fully staffed in advance of Election Day, elections registrars from nearly all of the region’s nine counties told KQED.

“This election, we had just an overwhelming amount of applications,” said Clint Wolfrom, manager of the poll worker division at the San Francisco Department of Elections.

Several counties — including Contra Costa, Sonoma and San Francisco — report receiving a surplus of applicants from people wanting to be poll workers. County elections offices recruit these temporary workers and volunteers to pull off essential election-related tasks, like picking up ballots from drop boxes, scanning ballots and verifying signatures.

According to Wolfrom, this year, San Francisco County saw the most applications to be poll workers since at least the 2016 general election — over 6,000 applications to fill nearly 3,000 positions. Wolfrom added that much like voter turnout, interest in working the polls typically spikes for presidential elections.

Contra Costa and Solano county officials told KQED that they are training around 1,000 workers each to staff polling places in the days before Election Day.

Counties with fewer registered voters, like Napa and Marin, have fewer election workers — approximately 70 and 175 poll workers recruited for the November election, respectively.

KQED reached out multiple times to Alameda County’s Registrar of Voters about their poll worker hiring efforts this election but did not receive a response.

In San Mateo County, the work of training its more than 500 temporary election workers falls to people like Kevin Ashley. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, he led a poll worker training in the basement of the county’s elections headquarters.

“This is my twelfth election, my seventh as a trainer,” Ashley said, pointing to the pins he wears on his nametag, commemorating each election he has worked.

Regardless of folks’ prior experience, the class is mandatory because the processes and rules around voting often change between elections.

The pay for this job in San Mateo County is $22 an hour, and in order to qualify, workers need to complete an online class and pass a background check and a skills test. In total, it’s about 11 hours of training.

Ashley said it’s all in the service of making sure things go smoothly once they start working the vote center floor. At the training itself, workers learn the ins and outs of voting, from how to look up a voter’s registration to how to clear a paper jam out of a printer.

“We bring them in here, and we let them have hands-on experience, so they go, ‘Oh, is that the button I should press? Oh, is that what a seal looks like?’” he said.

Ken Einstein, a 75-year-old semi-retired software design consultant from San Mateo, attended Ashley’s training. Einstein is among those who will be working the polls for the first time.

“So far, I’m very impressed with how complete and thorough the training has been,” Einstein said. “It’s a lot of work!”

With the passage of the Voters Choice Act in California in 2016, the roles of poll workers have expanded. The law allows counties to opt in to a model where voters can cast a ballot at any vote center within their county instead of at their assigned precinct. These vote centers also provide more services and are open days earlier than precinct polling places. (Of the nine Bay Area counties, only San Francisco, Contra Costa and Solano counties have not opted in.)

Jim Irizarry, the assistant chief elections officer for San Mateo County, said that poll workers have many different duties they perform, but election security is among the top priorities — in light of the increasingly contentious climate related to elections in recent years.

“Election workers are trained to be vigilant for threats on-site that could disrupt voting,” Irizarry said. “These workers are the eyes and ears of the elections department at the field level. Their job is to make sure things are safe and secure.”

That means maintaining a safe, apolitical environment for people to cast their ballot, but it also means ensuring timely pickup of ballots from drop boxes and verifying all voter information with the state’s online database.

Einstein said he was motivated to get involved because he was fed up with hearing reports of people spreading misinformation and expressing mistrust about the process. He said he wanted to do what he could to help out locally and make sure the election ran smoothly.

“As many people have said, the system is only as strong as the people who are making it run and maintaining it,” Einstein said. “That meant a lot to me.”

Since 2018, Lynn Khor, a 60-year-old retired chemical engineer from Belmont, has worked seasonally as a vote center representative. She immigrated to the U.S. from Malaysia decades ago as a student and eventually became a naturalized citizen. She said being someone who had to earn the right to vote in this country gives her a different perspective.

“Knowing how involved the voting process is, you will see how serious this country takes democracy,” she said. “You go through so much work in order to preserve that democracy, and that’s why you gotta have the deepest appreciation for it.”