October 30, 2008
UW students to work at polling places election day
Armon Dadgar was surprised by the amount of stuff King County Elections wants him to know on Election Day, Nov. 4 — and not just about the issues and the candidates.
Dadgar is one of 170 UW students recruited by Taso Lagos, a lecturer in the Department of Communication, to work at King County polling places on election day. The group is part of Partnership in Democracy, a county program which has recruited about 5,000 workers, many of them with tech savvy, to troubleshoot during the day.
Record U.S. voter turnout is predicted, including 85 percent of registered voters in King County, and a New York Times article reports at least 11 states will use new voting technologies.
The average age of veteran poll workers is 72, and a good many of them have told King County elections officials that they’re no longer comfortable with the amount of accountability and tech savvy that contemporary polling places require, said King County Elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan.
Election officials have thus sought workers like Dadgar, who’s also one of 17 students in Electing America, a two-credit UW course taught by Lagos.
Polling place work is good for his students, Lagos said. “They get to see how democracy really works.” Another group of Lagos’ students worked at King County polling places during the August 19 primary.
To prepare for their 16-hour shifts on Election Day, workers are required to attend a three-hour training session, which includes training on AccuVote, an optical scanning machine, and on a special, handicap-accessible voting machine. The training was thorough, said Dadgar, 17 (he’s an early admissions student). “They even told us what to do if there’s a bomb threat: Leave the premises!”
Partnership in Democracy recruited several kinds of workers: business employees whose companies agreed to donate their time, members of organizations who each agreed to donate his or her $150 fee for the day to a favorite nonprofit and students who have designated their $150 for fundraising efforts for a nonprofit or are receiving credit for community service. Members of Lagos’ class voted to donate their pay toward scholarships for the Athens Program, which is administered by Lagos and has sent UW students to Greece to study democracy and the Greek press the last four summers.
