Last-minute Philly poll worker appointments worry experienced election hands

About 200 new Republican poll workers were appointed last week to help run Philadelphia voting sites, alarming some veteran workers who fear that an influx of untrained, last-minute hires could cause chaos on Election Day.

During a hearing in a City Hall courtroom on Oct. 23, a judge appointed people to fill hundreds of technically vacant positions. Most of the openings were for “minority inspectors,” who are part of the five-person teams who will check in voters on Nov. 5 and oversee voting machines in each of the city’s 1,703 election divisions.

While such hearings take place before every election, there haven’t been so many appointments at once since 2016, said Lisa Deeley, vice chair of the City Commissioners, who run elections in the city. 

In 2020, the pandemic suppressed interest in poll work, she said, and in other years, less prominent elections for state and local offices involved many fewer appointments.

As a result, the mass hiring came as a surprise and a “shock” to some workers, including the judges of elections who serve as the team leaders, said Dan Rennie, a poll worker who attended the hearing. 

He said Republican attorneys asked to fill 255 positions and the city objected to four that were already occupied. The City Commissioner’s office said there were 198 hearings but it did not have the final number of appointments.

Rennie’s division in Fishtown is getting a new minority inspector, who will also be able to appoint someone to a clerk position, he said.

“We’ve had a consistent team for the last four or five elections. It’s been the same people working in these roles each time,” he said. If the new minority inspector brings a friend to serve as clerk, “we’d be out two experienced people for two people who potentially have never even taken trainings.”

Both parties want to maintain confidence in elections

Given the efforts to disrupt voting across the country, both recently and during the 2020 presidential election, some said they feared the appointments were part of an effort to gum up the process in Philadelphia. 

“From what I hear, it was all Republicans that orchestrated it, and it’s such a low-key kind of effort,” said Brenda Hebert, a Democrat who served as a judge of elections for four years in Ward 15, Division 15, in the West Spring Garden area. She stepped down from the post earlier this year. “In my experience as J.O.E. and in my paranoia as a voter and a citizen of this country, especially since Philadelphia is ground zero — it could be trouble.”

“I want people to be able to vote, and I don’t want anyone to leave the line because they don’t trust the process,” said Jessica O’Neill, a judge of elections in Fishtown. “And I don’t want anyone’s vote to be thrown out because of confusion or an attempt to disenfranchise people. That’s what I’m most worried about.”

However, Matt Wolfe, a Republican attorney who recruited some of the new workers and participated in last week’s hearing, argued that the appointments actually further the goal of encouraging people to vote.

“Are Republicans going to have confidence in the election process if there aren’t any Republicans on the election boards?” he asked. “That’s why the state law is set up the way it is, to make sure that both parties have representation on these individual divisional election boards. It’s a good system. It limits opportunities for fraud. It gives confidence in the electoral process.”

Wolfe, who is also a Republican ward leader in West Philly, noted that “voter fraud is not a major issue” (despite false claims by Donald Trump and some of his supporters that it is rampant across Pennsylvania). 

“But that being said, the best way to prevent it from being a major issue is to keep eyes on the process,” Wolfe said.

Deeley said the poll workers’ concerns about the flood of appointments are understandable. But she said they were entirely legal, and she urged teams to do their best when they, and the new workers, arrive at their polling places before 7 a.m. next Tuesday.

“If people come in, the court’s given them the authority to be there. They’re entitled to be there,” she said. “It’s a long day to begin with. It’s made longer if people are arguing with each other. So introduce yourself and be prepared to work for 14 hours.”

If all else fails, hold a curbside election

Each division is supposed to have an Election Board with five people, meaning there could be about 8,500 poll workers citywide, if all the positions are filled. 

Three of those positions are supposed to be filled through elections. Those are the judge of elections — who manages the polling site and other workers — the majority inspector, and the minority inspector. The minority inspector comes from whichever party got the second-most votes in the division in the most recent November election. In most of Democrat-dominated Philadelphia, that’s the Republican Party. 

The minority inspector also gets to appoint a clerk, and the City Commissioners appoint a machine inspector who sets up voting machines and instructs voters on using them.

While the judges of elections and inspectors are supposed to be elected by voters during regular elections, often no one runs, especially for minority inspector. In many of the city’s wards — the larger political units that include multiple divisions — there isn’t even a Republican ward committee to recruit and run candidates.

If a position is vacant on Election Day or no one shows up at the polling place to do the job, there are various ways to make sure the work gets done. 

For example, a judge of elections can just pick a majority inspector and vice versa, according to a guide on the City Commissioners’ website. Any registered voter of any party can also be installed into a job on the spot, on the morning of Election Day, by a show of hands from voters present. That’s called a curbside election.

However, positions can also be filled during Court of Common Pleas hearings that happen before every election, Deeley and Wolfe said. 

To judges of elections, it may feel like their experienced team members are being unexpectedly booted in favor of random newbies, but Wolfe said he and the other lawyers were following a standard, common legal filing process to fill vacancies.

“We did it in the spring. We did it last fall. We did it the spring before that. This is something we do every year,” Wolfe said. “Sometimes the [Republican] City Committee runs a more extensive effort. It was a bit more extensive this time, but I think in the past we’ve probably filed 300 in an election cycle before.”

Untrained and bleary on Election Day morning?

Judges of election are paid $205 for working on Election Day, while the other four positions earn $200. 

They get additional pay if they have attended trainings — $50 for the standard training and $30 for a refresher on the new, iPad-like electronic poll books the commissioners introduced last year to check voters in. 

The City Commissioners have been offering training sessions for months, and are continuing to do so this week, both in-person and online. But they cannot require workers to attend and, in some places, untrained inspectors and possibly even judges of elections will be stepping into the jobs for the first time on Tuesday morning.

Hebert, the former judge of elections, said she worked with the City Commissioners’ office to install a trained successor. But now it turns out he’ll be the majority inspector, and the judge is a new person unknown to the others on the team, she said.

It’s “scary, because the J.O.E. has tremendous authority over everything that goes on at the polling place,” she said. “The J.O.E. signs off on all the tickets that spit out of the machine. The J.O.E. is in charge of the process of allowing people to vote. I don’t know what the J.O.E. specifically could do [to disrupt voting], but I do know that they have the last word on whatever goes on.”

Rennie said he thinks his team is experienced enough to work around any issues that come up due to having an untrained person on hand. 

But he also noted that they’ll be working under tight time constraints. They’ll arrive on site around 6:10 a.m. to set up the room and machines, and people will line up to start voting at 7 a.m. If an inspector doesn’t show, the rules say the team has to wait until 7:30 to have a curbside election to fill the position, potentially creating a growing backlog of restless voters, he said.

In a Facebook group for city election workers where he shared news about the hearing, others have similar concerns, he said.

“Genuinely, no one cares whether it’s a Republican that works or not. We just want to make sure that everything runs efficiently,” he said. “If we get a replacement, but they’re fully trained and they know what they’re doing, that’s no skin off anyone’s back. But it’s all the unknowns during the busiest election that is concerning to everyone.”

Wolfe countered that there’s still time for new workers to be trained, and the issues that Rennie and others are worried about come up in every election.

“Each and every person did it for the first time at some point,” he said. “It’s not a perfect system. There are people that don’t show up every year. Some new people aren’t going to show up. Some people that have been coming for six years aren’t going to show up.”

“There are people that aren’t trained every year, and do a bad job every year,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re trying to get good people on the boards.”

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