Elections ’88 : Orange County : Poll Workers Make Election Day Happen for Voters

Polling inspector Patricia Soderquist of Fullerton says her favorite part of Election Day is watching the neighborhood kids who have just turned 18 vote for the first time.

“I’ve watched them growing up,” Soderquist said. “It’s a big thrill to watch them having their first experience at voting.”

Soderquist is one of about 8,500 people who will be manning Orange County’s 2,114 polling places, which are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. today, as voters cast their ballots for a variety of ballot measures, choose two county supervisors and select their presidential, congressional and legislative nominees.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Don Tanney has predicted a 50% turnout, slightly more than is expected at a statewide level, because of widespread interest in the controversial slow-growth initiative, Measure A, and two hotly contested congressional races.

Tanney and his staff have spent six months getting ready for the primary, printing sample and regular ballots, finding polling places and training judges and inspectors to ensure a fair election. The cost: about $1.5 million.

Inevitably, there are last-minute emergencies the day before the election.

“Today is insanity,” Deanna Werelius, a precinct section supervisor in the registrar of voters office, said Monday morning. Among the problems were telephone calls from polling employees who were unable to meet their commitments. What then?

“Panic,” Werelius joked. “No, we stay calm.” Using street indexes, Werelius and others called people in the precincts where they have vacancies and, when they found replacements, got them in for emergency training sessions.

Election Day employees get paid from $35 to $40 each, and another $7 if they are required to attend an hourlong training session. They begin their days before the polls open and work after they close. Even if one counts only the 13 hours the polls are open, they are paid between $2.33 to $3.13 an hour, less than the current minimum wage of $3.35 per hour.

“They get compensated,” Werelius said. “But you could in no way say they get paid for it.”

Among their chores is to make sure that everyone who wants to cast a vote can do so, if eligible. An effort is made to select places that are accessible to wheelchairs. If there still is a problem, a polling booth might literally be brought out to the voter.

“We may bring everything to them and then back away from them while they vote so they have privacy,” Werelius said. “But we would never turn anybody away who was a legitimate voter.”

About 200 of the county’s polling places are in schools, community centers or other public places. Many others are in clubhouses in the county’s two Leisure Worlds, mobile home parks and other gated communities. But many of the rest are in homes like Soderquist’s.

Then again, maybe they are not exactly like Soderquist’s.

Soderquist, a self-described “professional volunteer” who has been offering her home as a polling place for about 10 years, said she has the system down. While most polling places in private homes are in open garages, at Soderquist’s home voters come right into the family room.

Soderquist provides chicken soup and rolls--and Lotte Johnston from down the street provides coffee cake--for polling place workers and a big welcome to neighborhood voters. She said she believes that there is a higher percentage of voters there because everyone knows everyone else.

“We know who votes and who doesn’t,” Soderquist says. “As a result, they vote!”

Soderquist said that running a polling place “is not a one-day thing.”

“It takes organization to make sure everything is going to run smoothly,” she said. “We have two goals. We want to make it convenient for people to exercise their right to vote and, secondly, we try to make it run as smoothly as we can for them.”

By the time the ballots have been dropped off at the Fullerton Police Department and Soderquist gets back home to clean up, it’s usually about midnight.

“It’s tiring. It is not easy to do this,” Soderquist said. “We’re pretty washed out for a couple of days afterwards.” But, she added, “The rewards are great.”

TODAY’S ELECTION

Orange County’s 2,114 polling places will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. today. Twenty phone lines will be added at the county registrar of voters office to handle questions. The number is (714) 567-7600.

Registrar Don Tanney estimated that about half of the county’s 1,037,251 registered voters will cast ballots.

As of the registration deadline May 9, 563,039, or 54.3%, of the county’s registered votes were Republicans and 366,883, or 35.4%, were Democrats.