Braxton Taylor
More than 163,000 veterans and military family members have stepped up to serve as poll workers for the Nov. 5 elections at polling locations nationwide to help ensure that the voting process goes smoothly and results in a fair count.
The number recruited from the military community for poll worker duty this year far exceeds the 63,500 veterans and family members who joined up to put in shifts at polling stations for the midterm elections in 2022, according to the nonprofit Vet the Vote coalition of 43 advocacy groups and other organizations formed in 2022 to promote veteran and family member participation in elections.
“Our community makes for a good workforce” to take on the nuts and bolts of running one of the more than 132,000 polling stations expected to be recording votes next Tuesday, said Ellen Gustafson, a Navy spouse and co-founder of the Vet the Vote organization, which now has the support of the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and NASCAR.
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From long experience, veterans and military families have a built-in propensity for following rules and procedures, Gustafson said, which makes them a good fit for dealing with an elections process that varies from state to state for the projected total of 900,000 to one million poll workers who will be needed to process next week’s elections.
Election Day is Nov. 5, and Americans across the country will be heading to the polls to vote for president — between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump — as well as a wide variety of House and Senate seats.
The specific duties of the poll worker depend on the location and the training provided by state or local authorities, but “most jurisdictions task election workers with setting up and preparing the polling location, welcoming voters, verifying voter registrations, and issuing ballots,” according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent arm of the federal government.
“Poll workers also help ensure voters understand the voting process by demonstrating how to use voting equipment and explaining voting procedures,” the commission said on its website.
Gustafson, also a co-founder and executive director of the We the Veterans advocacy group, said veterans and military families also are well-suited for dealing with the invective and potential threats that are the inevitable byproduct of the charged political atmosphere in a sharply divided nation.
The call for veterans and family members to volunteer as poll workers was “based on a belief that our community would step up to serve again when asked,” Gustafson said. “Yeah, we sure are hearing about threats. There are people questioning the integrity of our elections,” she said, and “that includes questioning the integrity of the poll workers who do the work.”
But the military community by nature is well-equipped to deal with adversity, Gustafson said. “I think we are comfortable with the idea that sometimes situations are challenging and the first goal is to de-escalate,” she said.
A report released earlier this month by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland appeared to back up Gustafson’s claim. The report gave the results of a survey experiment “designed to examine how information that election officials are hiring veterans and military family members for the elections workforce influences the public’s attitudes about elections.”
“Across all of the questions we asked,” the survey said, “information about the recruitment of veterans and military family members to elections jobs led to improved outcomes (such as improved confidence, and less concern about the potential for violence).”
In separate phone interviews, Gustafson and Chris Purdy, founder and CEO of the Chamberlain Network and a member of the Vet the Vote coalition, were careful to note the distinction between a poll worker and a “poll watcher.”
Poll workers are nonpartisan, while a poll watcher can be appointed by a political party to observe the process at a polling site for possible political gain, according to Vet the Vote. “We’re not encouraging our members to do that,” Purdy said of poll watching.
Instead, the Chamberlain Network, named for Union Civil War hero and Maine governor Joshua Chamberlain, was urging veterans to “find out what their community needs to make sure the election is free and fair.”
Following the elections, the goal of the Chamberlain Network is to “rally veterans in their communities. Our goal is to empower veterans to defend democracies in their communities,” said Purdy, a former National Guard sergeant who served in Iraq in 2011.
The intention is to “train veterans to learn and understand issues and then go out and talk to their local representatives about those issues in ways that will improve their communities,” Purdy said.
In a Tuesday address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough gave a shout out to the Vet the Vote organization and said nobody was more qualified to volunteer as poll workers than the veterans “who put their lives on the line to defend the Constitution.”
You can find links from state election offices on registering to vote, updating your information, options to cast a ballot, and where to vote by visiting eac.gov/vote.
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