State: Working at polls: Long hours, low pay, national profile

As dozens of South Florida poll workers struggled to start their voting machines the morning of Sept. 10 -- the dawn of another dreadful election -- everything came together like a dream at Precinct 266 in mid Pinellas County.

An hour before the polls opened, there was time to conduct one more test of the new touch screen machines. With half an hour left, workers had little to do but straighten their county-issue No. 2 pencils.

Kitty Grubb, a 50-year-old Seminole lawyer, set the tone with her cheerful South Carolina accent, a talent for organization and a determination to treat the voters as "guests."

Grubb decorated the polling place with banners, flowers, balloons and a red-white-and-blue tablecloth. Children who came with their parents got stickers and balloons. When a voter arrived without his glasses, several poll workers offered him theirs.

"We just tried to make it friendly and engaging and draw them in," said Grubb, a rookie poll worker who signed up after Florida's 2000 election debacle, thinking the state could use all the help it could get.

"I wanted it to work right," she said.

Though exceptional, conditions at Precinct 266 were not perfect. Like thousands of polling places across Florida, the staff put in a 15-hour day for nominal pay. They pushed hard through a busy morning and evening, fought boredom in the afternoon and suffered the scowls of voters who were not properly registered.

Now, as the state tries again to redeem itself in the Nov. 5 general election, Florida's poll workers have the added burden of working under a spotlight after years of laboring in comfortable anonymity.

With 60 percent of Floridians voting on new machinery for the first time, the state's greatest fear on Sept. 10 was that voters would somehow flub the process, as many did in November 2000. Instead, the voters adapted nicely. Ill-trained poll workers caused errors in just enough precincts to throw the Democratic governor's race into doubt for a week.

A mix of women and men, white, black, Asian and Hispanic, the 40,000 to 50,000 Floridians who serve as poll workers are less diverse when it comes to age.

Those who aren't retired are largely middle-aged people with stable careers that allow them to take time off. They wish more younger people would join their ranks. They are weary of the jokes about "Floriduh." And they are troubled by the state's continuing problems, centered in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

"They weren't as well-trained as we were," lamented Mina Griest, 62, of Hudson, who has been a Pasco County poll worker for about four years. "It's a shame. Why should we be (poorly) reflected on because of two counties?"

Despite the problems, many poll workers said in interviews that they enjoy the bonds they develop with their colleagues, and most of them spoke of an abiding conviction that what they do on Election Day somehow advances the cause of democracy.

For Joyce Russell, who served in her first election on Sept. 10, working at the polls allowed her to help minority voters in her racially diverse precinct in Town 'N Country.

A 53-year-old black woman, she works as Hillsborough County's African-American liaison.

"I had no idea that so many people went in and didn't know what they were doing, and didn't ask or didn't feel like they could," Russell said, referring to November 2000. As a voter, she had come to regard the polling place as a "stoic" room where voters got in and out with as little human contact as possible.

Her background, she said, gave her the ability to notice the subtle body language of minorities who were "having trouble and didn't want to ask."

At first, Lori White of Broward County grudgingly agreed to work at the polls because her husband asked her to. "But now that I've been through this, I'd definitely be back again," she said.

Why?

The day went so poorly, she figures the county could use the help. "This really is important and needs to be done well,"' White said.

Of the eight voting machines in her Hollywood precinct, one never worked and two kept breaking down. The cell phone promised by the supervisor of elections never materialized, leaving them isolated for most of the day with a strange feeling: "It was like we were holding our own little election."

Once, she said, they borrowed a voter's cell phone to call for help.

"It just didn't seem well organized," said White, 41, who with her 40-year-old husband, Dan, defied the common wisdom that younger people with families don't have the time to be poll workers.

The parents of five children, ages 6 to 14, they arranged for friends to collect the kids from school, feed them dinner and put them to bed on Sept. 10. "It's good for them to know that this is important," Lori White said of her children.

The day went better for Tom and Josephine Manning, a Coral Springs couple who manned a precinct in Broward.

With the county converting to touch screen machines, the two figured they could help. "My wife and I are quite computer literate," said Tom Manning, 64, retired from long careers in software and computer technology for Motorola and Raytheon Co. "We had a good time."

He said they signed up for "just a little civic involvement."

Gloria James, who became a Hillsborough County poll worker in 1991, said she was motivated by a desire to see as many people as possible come to the polls. The former president of the League of Women Voters in New Jersey, she gets worried when too few people turn out. "That means their choices are going to run the world," said James, 69. "That strikes terror in my heart."

Tom Goodman, a spokesman for the National Association of Counties, recently discovered what a "thankless job" it is to work in the polls. As the coordinator of a 2-year-old national campaign to recruit 100,000 more poll workers by Nov. 5, he figured he had better sign up himself in his home county in Maryland.

Seeing firsthand the long hours, the low pay and the occasional conflicts with voters, he came to a sobering conclusion. "I guess I can understand why people don't want to do it," Goodman said. "For what you get out of it, you've really got to find it in yourself to say it's really worthwhile."

The recruiting campaign, meanwhile, has failed for lack of a large corporate sponsor. Now, Goodman and others are beginning to think that many counties may need to explore ways to replace or improve on a system that relies so heavily on the volunteer spirit of mostly older citizens.

"Maybe we need to look at how we're doing this," he said, echoing voices in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, which, on Nov. 5, will staff an election for the first time with large numbers of county workers.

With more attention on the issue now, the nation's poll worker problems stand a better chance of getting solved, said Grubb, the Pinellas lawyer who decorated her precinct.

It had better improve, she said, noting how people make the "heroic" effort to vote. In her precinct, they arrived in wheelchairs and attached to oxygen tanks. They came with kids in tow and stethoscopes around their necks.

"You really knew these people were very, very tired," she said. "I was moved by that. I thought, "I'll never not vote again.' "

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk