Election workers’ long days and low pay — often below minimum wage — are making it difficult for municipal clerks to find people willing to take the jobs in the pandemic. Ahead of spring town elections and the state primaries in the fall, some hope to draw in more workers by increasing their stipends.
Though the pay and hours have long been tough, particularly with only being called on a few days out of the year for elections, recruitment problems were exacerbated in the pandemic for those who might worry about being indoors with voters all day.
“I think they deserve a raise because they show up at 6 o’clock in the morning, they go home at 9 o’clock at night, you know, that’s a long day,” said Beverly City Clerk Lisa Kent. “The busy elections, you don’t have time to sit down or know your name. ... They’re just good workers and they really deserved it a long time ago.”
Many election workers are retirees, which has put an extra strain on local elections during the pandemic because they are older and more vulnerable to infection, making some of them more reluctant to work the polls in the pandemic, said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association.
“Communities need to stand up very complex operations,” Beckwith said, “usually hiring scores and scores of one-day volunteers. The reason why I call them volunteers is the pay generally has been extremely low. And almost all are retired and are doing this as an extension of their community service, really.”
Lydia Weston has been working elections in Beverly for the last five years. Weston, who is 78, said the city has taken great care with COVID-19 precautions, which has kept her comfortable at polling places, although she knows other older workers who stopped coming.
“I would love for some younger people to step up,” Weston said, “because we can’t do it all by ourselves. In fact, we had to have somebody from another city come in at one point.”
Beckwith said one response to recruiting more elections workers is to raise stipends.
“But that, of course, is something that's not built into municipal budgets,” Beckwith said. “And so we’re really hoping that the state will recognize that and provide assistance to cities and towns so they can have the poll workers that we need in order to run the elections in the most effective and efficient way possible.”
In Beverly, Kent is proposing to nearly double the city’s current stipend rates of $125 to $150 a day, depending on duties. With a working day that can stretch from 14 to 16 hours, that rate can result in as little as $8 an hour. Kent’s new budget would raise the daily rates to $235 to $270 a day.
Weston said that would make a significant difference to her, since she says she's concerned about how effectively her social security payments can keep up with her expenses.
“That will help with the grocery bill, for example,” Weston said. “And in my personal life, I have three dogs ... and I'm going to the vet every five minutes, so it will really help with that.”
Beckwith said many communities still pay relatively low stipends for election workers, yet are facing a need to recruit more people. And the rise of mail-in voting during the pandemic is making elections even more complicated to run, Beckwith said, because mail-in-voting doesn’t eliminate the need for brick-and-mortar polling places for those who still prefer to cast their ballots in person.
“So while in the long run, we may have fewer people showing up to vote,” said Beckwith, “it’s still a very important service to provide to ensure that we're a democratic society.”
