Tamia Fowlkes
Angela Maloney
Angela Maloney: UW-sophomore and poll worker.
When he’s not in class or doing school work, Milan Stolpman waits for responses to a text that could alter the outcome of the 2020 election.
The message reads: Are you interested in being a poll worker?
Stolpman, a junior at UW-Madison, and his peers are seeking volunteers across the state to work the November presidential election through a national initiative called The Campus Compact Safe Elections Project. The project is training 300 students to recruit other students through digital organizing and educational programming.
Currently, there is a nationwide shortage of poll workers. Older and retired volunteers typically staff poll stations around the country but many this year are not working due to concerns around COVID-19. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey, 58% of poll workers during the 2018 midterms were 61 and older.
“Unless younger Americans step up,” reads the website of the Campus Compact Safe Elections Project, “the resulting shortage of poll workers could mean closed polling places and long delays in communities across the country.”
This spring Wisconsin felt the pinch of the worker shortage. Voters at some locations faced barriers in accessing the polls, including long lines and inadequate safety precautions, and poll workers stayed up through the night to process absentee ballots.
In the city of Madison, recalls Maribeth Witzel-Behl, Madison city clerk, “there were four polling places that were processing absentee ballots until four o’clock the next morning because they didn't have enough hands to move any more quickly.”
Stolpman says the April election showed how poll worker shortages can impact in particular voters who are part of marginalized and oppressed communities.
The consequences of this reality were most prominently seen in cities like Milwaukee, which hosted just five polling locations, though it normally has 180.
Milan Stolpman
UW-Madison junior Milan Stolpman helps recruit students to work the polls through a national initiative called The Campus Compact Safe Elections Project.
Since Stolpman and his peers started their work in August, the Madison City Clerk’s Office has announced that it is no longer accepting poll worker applications as it has signed up 6,000 poll workers to work Nov. 3. “That is twice as many officials as we had in November 2016, November 2012, or November 2008,” reads a statement on the office’s website.
Witzel-Behl says that over half the city’s poll workers will be first-time poll workers in November.
“They've stepped up and stepped up in thousands, which is pretty incredible,” she says. Witzel-Behl says the workers will be the “difference in our ability to run results by the end of the night” or “to continue processing absentee ballots past midnight and have a really late set of results.”
But just because Madison is set does not mean Stolpman’s work is done. He is now helping recruit student poll workers to work in Green Bay and Beloit on Election Day. Both cities are still looking for poll workers.
“Everyone has been so open and excited to help out, and that's the thing about our generation. We are all politically engaged and want to help,” says Stolpman. “The stakes of this election are simply too great to risk the potential of a poll worker shortage, and our current actions will assuredly resonate through the generations to come.”
Angela Maloney, a sophomore at UW-Madison, is an intern with the League of Women Voters of Dane County where she works to mobilize student voters through registration and voter education events.
She is also a poll worker. Maloney first worked the polls in the April election and says she has learned a lot from experienced poll workers and has seen the benefits of staffing polling locations with people who live in the community.
“It's really important that the people working at those polling locations are people from those communities because then when voters walk in they feel more comfortable,” says Maloney.
With just three weeks left before the presidential election, multiple efforts are underway at campuses across the state to make sure that students are informed. Here at UW-Madison, students continue to host voter education events on campus and work with university officials to increase voter accessibility on campus. And many of them are also voting early.
“As young people, we have a responsibility to take on this work,” says Stolpman. “Democracy depends on it and it’s going to reverberate through generations.”
