Being an election judge

Along with many of my neighbors, I have felt a certain anxiety about our upcoming elections. Much of my worry derives from an array of false statements President Donald Trump has made suggesting that our elections are rigged. From his claim that Hillary Clinton didn’t actually receive more popular votes than he did in 2016 to his endless statements claiming that Joseph Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Trump has for years attempted to sow doubt and discord concerning the integrity of our elections. He accuses Democrats of going to great lengths to skew results in their favor while providing little evidence to back up his assertions.

On the face of it, the president’s claims seem baseless. The Republican Party holds the presidency and the majority of seats in both Congress and the Senate. Twenty-six states have Republican governors while 28 have Republican-controlled legislatures. If the Democrats are skewing results in their favor, they’re certainly not very good at it.

The president has also claimed that millions of people vote illegally and consequently, he has demanded a number of investigations into voter fraud, a notable recent example being in Nevada, where the White House claimed up to 16,000 people were illegally registered to vote. Pressed to provide evidence for this claim, the White House dropped the number of potentially illegally registered voters to 185. That’s about .00009% of Nevada’s 2,506,232 registered voters.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar noted that when state election officials received the list of the voter numbers flagged as possible noncitizens, it checked voter registration records, including the type of ID included in registration applications and found no evidence of anyone on the list being a noncitizen. Aguilar stated, “Our records do not support the Department of Homeland Security’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that. Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”

Recently the president has said he may send federal officers, including ICE agents, to monitor elections. That ought to give us all the willies not only because ICE officers have behaved violently and outside the law but because Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution reads, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;…” This clearly places the responsibility for elections in the hands of the states and state control of elections has been upheld in our courts throughout American history. One important result of keeping elections in the hands of the states is that it puts election administration closer to the voters.  

Here’s an example: I was for many years an election judge — a poll worker — in my community, walking over in the early morning to the Catholic Rec Hall on Election Day to welcome and assist voters. Our duties as judges included setting up the polling place and the voting equipment, directing voters to the correct precinct tables, distributing ballots and showing people how to vote, making sure every qualified voter was able to vote, closing the polling place at the end of the voting time and determining and certifying the results.

I knew a great many of the voters. They lived in my neighborhood. Many were friends or acquaintances. Those I didn’t know, I often recognized, having seen them in shops and businesses or at high school plays or sporting events or at the library auction. Voting day gave me a chance to say hello to a lot of people, to get to know the ones I hadn’t met before and to be of service in my community.

Because election judges and voters knew each other, we had faith in each other. I knew the voters weren’t illegally casting their votes, and the voters knew I wasn’t trying to illegally influence the election. 

Wyoming law requires that election judges “be divided between the participating political parties as equally as possible.” Because I’m a registered Democrat in a heavily Republican area, this meant that I was in demand as an election judge. So if you want to see what the job’s like, register Democratic. The county clerk will soon be calling and you’ll find yourself sitting at the polling station for very long days chatting with fellow poll workers from different political parties.

This is how we learn to trust in our elections, how we maintain faith in the integrity of those elections. It’s not by having agents of the federal government with masks and weapons suddenly arrive in town, but by recognizing that it is our friends and neighbors who help administer and verify the honesty of our elections, people with whom we share our communities and our democratic ideals.