An Election Without Chaos Will Be a Miracle
My poll-worker training in Greene County, New York, consisted of two, two-and-a-half-hour training sessions, held in an unventilated room in a senior drop-in center, where a lot of masks had fallen below noses. At one point, we abandoned all pretense of social distancing to practice using the voting machines. Come November 3, our charge will be to administer the most basic level of the democratic process. We will be, you could say, the guardians of democracy.
We were paid $60 for the training. We’ll be paid $225 for the 16 and a half hours we’ll work on Election Day, at polling locations I suspect won’t be perfectly COVID-compliant.
But I’m not in it for the money, and I’ve got an N95 mask, gloves, a face shield, and five canisters of FDA-approved wipes. I’m up for the risk. I signed up for this. I’m glad I did. It has helped me appreciate the labyrinthine weirdness of our nation’s electoral system—and the importance of reforming it.
[Anne Applebaum: The election is in danger. Prepare now.]
Over the summer, the call had gone out: The nation needed poll workers to prevent mass disenfranchisement during the pandemic. Activists and celebrities (Trevor Noah, LeBron James) were doing their utmost to glamorize a job previously
