This article was originally produced for the Granite State News Collaborative.
Keene resident Steven Geller was just looking for an interesting way to connect with people in his community.
The 75-year-old retiree said he has made a habit in recent years of signing up for one-time gigs that are likely to put him in new situations with a variety of people. He’s volunteered, for instance, to deliver Valentine’s Day flowers and Christmas poinsettias. And now, for the first time, he’s signed up to help run a city election.
Geller, a retired oral surgeon and veteran of the U.S. Air Force, said he vaguely recalls an email from a veterans group that caught his eye. The message asked if he was interested in helping out at the polls on Nov. 8.
“When I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, that might be an interesting thing to do,’” he said.
So he filled out a brief online questionnaire, exchanged a couple of emails and provided his availability.
“It’s not a huge commitment,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d commit to doing it every week or even every month, but it was like a single kind of thing, so I thought, ‘Yeah, let me see what it’s about.’”
The online form that Geller filled out wasn’t provided by local or state officials. Rather, it was provided by Power the Polls, a national campaign that a coalition of businesses and nonprofits launched in 2020 in response to a poll-worker shortage. When volunteers finish inputting their information, the system automatically sends an email to the volunteer’s local election official.
Jane Slusser, program manager at Power the Polls, said more than 700,000 potential poll workers nationwide signed up through the system in 2020. Another 125,000 have signed up so far this year since the system relaunched in May, she said.
“The initiative works with companies, organizations and election officials from across the political spectrum to ensure that local elections officials' needs are identified and met by casting a wide net to find a new pool of younger, more diverse and nonpartisan poll workers,” Slusser said in a statement. “Our funding comes from a number of philanthropic groups and foundations.”
Keene City Clerk Patty Little said Geller was among about two dozen people in Keene who have volunteered this year through the Power the Polls system. When her office began receiving the emails unsolicited, Little said she checked in with the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office and confirmed that everything seems to be above board. Volunteers like Geller are put through the same qualifications-vetting process as all other volunteer poll workers, she said.
Even with 58 volunteer slots to fill this year across Keene’s five wards, Little said she’s had no problem finding enough people. For the past decade, her team has maintained a list of volunteers. That list had about 150 names on it, even before the newly vetted volunteers were added, she said. (In addition to volunteer poll workers, about 60 officials are elected or appointed to help run Keene’s election, Little said.)
Some volunteers work as greeters who help direct voters to the right spot depending on whether they are registered, Little said. Others work at same-day voter registration tables, especially in the two wards where many college students live, she said. And others help with clerical tasks the day after the vote.
Keene is just one of the 255 municipalities across New Hampshire. It takes a total of about 5,000 poll workers, including about 2,500 locally elected officials, to run all of the polling sites in the state, according to Anna Fay, communications director for the Secretary of State’s Office.
Even so, state and local officials say they haven’t encountered major challenges this year finding enough people.
Windham Town Clerk Nicole Merrill, who’s also president of the New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, said a lot of different voter advocacy groups have been reaching out to local election officials to help with the recruitment effort. Both political parties appointed ballot clerks in July, “and that was a great foundation to start with,” she said.
That’s not to say New Hampshire officials take poll workers for granted. During a talk this month at the University of New Hampshire Law Review's annual symposium in Concord, Secretary of State David Scanlan explained how important local volunteers are to the state’s decentralized voting system.
“Our elections would not run, certainly they wouldn't run well, without the volunteers that step forward and help with elections, whether they be locally elected officials or people who have stepped forward to be poll workers just to help out,” he said.
Scanlan, who has made voter confidence a major theme of his first year in the job, went on to explain how national trends and an aging population could impact New Hampshire’s election administration efforts in the future.
“Fewer and fewer people are willing to be poll workers,” he said. “It's a much bigger problem nationally than I think it is in New Hampshire, but even in New Hampshire the individuals that are working at the polls are elderly. We needed an infusion of youth to participate in that process. But it's time-consuming and the challenges are great. And sometimes, the poll workers have to deal with difficult situations and individuals.”
Manchester City Clerk Matthew Normand said he will have about 250 people working the Nov. 8 election. Since so many past volunteers return, Normand said his team hasn’t had problems finding enough people. But he’s always open to hearing from new volunteers.
“We’d never discourage people from reaching out and getting involved in the elections,” he said.
Manchester resident Eva Castillo, director of the New Hampshire Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees, said she has worked at the polls as an interpreter for years and seen that many immigrants feel disconnected from their local government officials. That leaves them unlikely to volunteer as poll workers, she said.
“In the city, we live in our own siloes,” Castillo said. “Unless the elected officials take the time to build those relationships with the communities, people are never going to be full participants in the democratic process, in the civic engagement.”
In Laconia, City Clerk Katie Gargano said there seems to be a direct correlation between overall civic engagement and the ease of finding poll workers.
“We have some wards that are fully staffed and thriving every year, and then we have some that struggle all the time with finding people to work the polls,” Gargano said.
“The wards that have the lower voter turnout are the ones that we have trouble with keeping them filled,” she added.
Back in Keene, although his primary motivation for working this election is to find an interesting way to interact with his community, Geller said he’s also sensitive to what he sees as a “really significant crossroads” for American democracy.
Every election is consequential, but this one seems especially likely to shape important policy matters with effects that could last for decades to come, Geller said.
“It’s an important time,” he said, “for people to let their voices be heard by who they select.”
Steven Porter is founder and editor of Granite Memo. These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.
