Eloisa Gómez /Alan Rubin
Eloisa Gómez (left) and Jen Rubin are both poll workers and part of a new storytelling series on the Love Wisconsin website. Rubin is also a producer of the series.
Somewhere along the line, the real story of how America’s votes are cast and counted got lost.
“There is a lot of disinformation circulating about ballots and how they are counted,” says Jen Rubin, the producer of a new series about poll workers for the digital storytelling website Love Wisconsin. The series aims to demystify the process of voting and counting our votes by hearing from poll workers themselves.
Like Leila Schuman of Lac du Flambeau, who started volunteering last April to save older poll workers from having to come out during the pandemic. Or Eloisa Gómez, of Milwaukee, a bilingual poll worker who volunteers in part because she wants the Latino/a community “to feel that they are an important part of the electoral process.” Or Pia Kinney James, (some may remember her as the first Black woman police officer in Madison), who has also been a voter ambassador doing voter education, and helped new poll workers learn the ropes.
Rubin, executive producer at Love Wisconsin, also locally co-produces The Moth StorySlam, leads storytelling workshops, and co-hosts the Inside Stories podcast.
She’s also a longtime poll volunteer.
“Anyone who’s ever been a poll worker knows that there are so many safeguards,” says Rubin. “I thought, ‘What if I find poll workers from different parts of the state who have taken on different roles in the process and through their stories, try to show that?’”
At first, Rubin wasn’t sure it would work. “But when I started interviewing, it became clear, oh yeah, there is a lot you can say.”
How can the pull of a particular person’s narrative do more work in demystifying the process than a news segment about voting safeguards? “I’m a fan of storytelling,” says Rubin. “For whoever doesn’t enjoy reading an article or attending a lecture, they might absorb information through a story.
“We all learn differently, and have different ways we like to get our information,” she adds. “Some people engage more with storytelling. Storytelling can amplify voices and lower fences in the community. That’s my hope.”
Rubin tried to have her 10 interview subjects explain why they stepped up to serve their community, why they think voting and democracy is important, and “have them add a fun little anecdote about something that happened to them.”
Rubin contacted the League of Women Voters and municipal clerks from all over the state to find a range of voices, diverse in geography, age, gender and race/ethnicity; she was looking for poll workers from big cities and from small towns, first-timers and veteran volunteers, and someone whose job it is to process absentee ballots. “The hardest diversity was to get gender. It was easy to find women. It was not that easy to find men.”
In the end, Rubin even included herself in the Love Wisconsin series. “I thought, let’s just throw a fun one in, because some of these are getting a little serious.” In her narrative, Rubin tells the story of how her third grade teacher showed her class how elections work through staging a vote for “favorite cookie,” with students giving presentations and campaigning.
Rubin does not yet have numbers on how many people have seen, read or engaged with the poll workers series, but website readership for the time period of its posting is up, she says, and the series has initiated lively commenting on the Love Wisconsin Facebook page.
Reading through the comments about the series on Facebook, Rubin says she came to realize that “if you don’t know, you don’t know.” Because civics education is given such short shrift in the schools, people “don’t understand the back end” of voting, says Rubin.
One commenter wrote that she had been given two ballots stuck together on election day and so could have voted twice. “No, she couldn’t have,” says Rubin. “People don’t realize how many people are at the polling place, doing different things.” Workers reconcile the ballots and the voter lists every hour, Rubin notes. “People don’t know how the safeguards are built in.”
Part of Rubin’s initial goal for the series was to have it be “a call to action, because initially there was a scary shortage of poll workers because of COVID-19.” But, she says, in the time it took to do the interviews, “for the most part, counties have the poll workers they need, people have stepped up.”
Above all, Rubin hopes the series makes the whole process more visible. “This is a really important part of our democracy. Democracy only works if we have elections. Elections only work if people step up to be poll workers. Poll workers only work if they are well trained.”
