No Rest After Elections : The Work Never Ends for Registrar of Voters

After 16 years at the San Diego County voter registrar’s office, Keith Boyer has grown accustomed to the “guess-you-can-start-slacking-off-now” comments that he usually encounters each year shortly after Election Day.

“Yeah, a lot of people assume once the election’s over, that’s it for us until next year,” said acting Registrar Boyer, chuckling. “I guess they assume there’s nothing else to do and that we sit around here playing cards until the next election.”

Indeed, employees at the registrar’s Kearny Mesa office say that an almost universal misconception about their work is the notion that it is strictly seasonal in nature, akin to that of Christmas tree sellers or tax preparers who work feverishly for a month or two each year and then bide their time until the next annual peak season.

“A comment I hear a lot is, ‘That’s just part-time work, isn’t it?’ ” said Jan Rogers, a senior clerk in charge of the registrar’s absentee ballot division.

“Before I started working here, I thought the same thing myself,” added Mary Michael, whose year-round duty involves finding hundreds of polling places and poll workers for each election. “People don’t realize there’s more to it than just counting the votes.”

While acknowledging the obvious--that the final weeks leading up to an election are to them what the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas sales period is to a retailer--registrar’s officials are eager to dispel the widely held perception that they do little more than mark time between elections.

A distorted image of the voter registrar office’s duties has developed, workers believe, because the public’s contact with the electoral process usually is limited to voting once a year. To the average person, the registrar is a vote counter who simply keeps track of registration rolls throughout the rest of the year. With no large-scale local election scheduled until next September’s San Diego City Council primary, many San Diegans probably assume, Boyer concedes, that “we’ll be coasting for the next nine months.”

As recently as 20 or 30 years ago, that somewhat unflattering picture of the registrar’s office--and, in particular, of a workload with more valleys than peaks--was not entirely inaccurate, Boyer admits. In those pre-computerized record-keeping days, “things were a lot simpler and it got pretty slow” between elections, Boyer said, adding that it was not uncommon for workers then to while away idle hours doing jigsaw puzzles.

But as the county’s population grew rapidly and election equipment gradually became more sophisticated, the registrar’s tasks also took on new dimensions, transforming the job into one that, in Boyer’s words, “doesn’t end the day after this election and begin a few weeks before the next one.”

“An election is sort of like a stage play or movie,” Boyer said. “You go in to the theater, you pay your money, and you see a play. It all seems very immediate, like it’s happening right now. You don’t really think about the months that have been spent on rehearsals or making scenery and costumes.

“It’s like that with an election. People vote and don’t think about the preparation that goes into it. But the voting booths don’t get set up and the polls don’t open by themselves. And that’s not something you just start thinking about the weekend before an election. It’s a continuing, month-by-month process.”

The registrar’s office has approximately a $5-million annual budget and currently has 56 permanent employees. In the fall preceding a major statewide election, however, that work force often is quadrupled via temporary employees hired to assist with the increased workload.

While Election Day marks the completion of the registrar’s most time-consuming and visible annual function, it also triggers other tasks, some of which continue year-round, quietly, behind the scenes.

Two months after last November’s election, the office now is in the midst of a major updating of the county’s 1.1-million-name voter registration list. About 540,000 postcards were mailed to registered voters who did not cast ballots in November, seeking to determine whether individuals moved, died or simply did not vote. Boyer anticipates that those cards will generate more than 100,000 changes that must be programmed into the county’s registration roster.

The registration list itself constantly changes throughout the year. Address changes, women reregistering under their married names, the registration of new San Diego residents and newly qualified 18-year-olds typically produce about 1,000 changes monthly--a number that swells dramatically when the major political parties periodically mount major registration drives.

In addition, senior clerk Lorraine Esparza’s duties include the rather grim task of canceling the registration of people whose names turn up on a countywide death list that she receives daily.

At other times, Esparza and other workers have the rather mind-numbing task of counting and verifying the signatures that appear on candidate or initiative petitions--a job that, in the case of a major statewide measure, involves checking the accuracy of thousands of names.

“It’s necessary and important . . . but it can be very tedious work,” Esparza said, noting that it takes about three minutes per name to compare a signature written on a petition against the voter’s registration data stored on microfiche at the registrar’s office.

Rogers, meanwhile, currently is updating the office’s so-called permanent absentee voter registration list. Disabled persons who otherwise would have difficulty going to the polls can request to automatically receive absentee ballots each year. Those who do not return their absentee ballots, however, are stricken from the 15,000-name list.

One of the most challenging year-round jobs in the office falls within the purview of Michael and a handful of co-workers, whose mission is to find hundreds of polling places and thousands of people willing to serve as poll workers at elections.

Their appeals to individuals’ civic-mindedness are rejected far more often than accepted, in no small measure because the poll jobs pay only $50 for a 14-hour Election Day shift, but also because of factors such as the prevalence of two-job families in which both adults work. Each of the workers has personal horror stories of having to make as many as 200 telephone calls in order to get a commitment from a single poll worker.

“The trick is to do a lot of begging throughout the year,” said Rita Watson. “When you get one, you try to keep him forever. You find yourself reading the obituaries and when you see a familiar name, thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Is that a poll worker?’ ”

“This is strictly a PR job,” added Elsie Lawson, laughing. “You have to PR-’em to death.”

Numerous other jobs continue unabated throughout the year, ranging from mundane administrative duties such as restocking voting machine parts and other supplies to altering street-by-street precinct maps to reflect new developments and subdivisions.

Workers also plan to visit more than 6,000 possible polling places throughout the county to insure that they are accessible to the handicapped, and top administrators frequently speak to high school civics classes throughout the year.

Reevaluation of existing election procedures is another constant, with the aim being a smoother election and faster vote tabulation. Boyer proudly points out that San Diego County finished its count last November about five hours after the polls closed, well ahead of other large counties in the state. This year, he hopes to improve that performance through the purchase of additional vote-counting machines and computers.

“In the end, it all comes down to the elections--that’s how we’ll be judged,” Boyer said. In addition to this fall’s San Diego’s elections, about a dozen smaller races, including contests to fill council vacancies in Carlsbad and Imperial Beach, will be held throughout the year.

“If the elections come off with no major problems, that’s what counts,” Boyer added. “That might cause people to appreciate the preparation that goes into making that happen. Maybe they’ll realize this isn’t just a one-day-a-year job.”