County Facing Shortage of Poll Workers

The Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office, the largest such operation in the nation, faces a looming shortage of poll workers that could jeopardize the integrity of elections, according to an audit released Friday.

“Without a long-term poll worker strategy,” auditors report, “the ability of the [county] to address the thousands of small balloting issues and glitches that occur at the polls may be compromised, resulting in disenfranchised voters and invalid ballots.”

County supervisors commissioned the study by the company Strategica months before voting quirks in Florida cast the presidential election into limbo.

But the audit has special significance in the wake of the goings-on in the Sunshine State, where high turnout in some precincts swamped election workers and led to allegations that voters were either turned away from the polls or not given the help they legally deserved.

Los Angeles’ problems are twofold, the audit found.

The county has the largest and most diverse electorate in the nation, with election materials required in six languages; three more languages are expected to be added after this year’s census.

And the county’s army of poll workers is aging rapidly, raising the possibility that voting sites will be sorely understaffed in the near future as demands for more multilingual workers grow.

Poll workers, volunteers who range from retirees to college students, staff the county’s polling places, doing everything from answering questions to checking the rolls.

The audit urges the county to formulate a strategic plan for elections in general and specifically for dealing with the potential shortage of poll workers. The report lays out several options, ranging from reducing the number of polling stations to increasing stipends for volunteers.

Assistant Registrar-Recorder Michael Petrucello said Friday that his office just received the audit and wants to review it before recommending movement in any specific direction. The Board of Supervisors has already requested a report from the registrar-recorder’s office next month on voting reforms.

Petrucello said he hopes that changes in voting patterns will lessen the office’s dependence on poll workers, who he said are increasingly hard to find.

“It’s progressively more and more difficult to recruit” poll workers, especially in the inner city, Petrucello said.

As to why that is, he added, “you might have to be a sociologist to get into those kind of things.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said that recruiting poll workers is a national problem but that the county clearly needs to step up its efforts. Still, he said, “there’s no reason to panic over this.”

Miguel Santana, a spokesman for Supervisor Gloria Molina, also said the county could deal with the issues raised in the audit, possibly by encouraging county workers to serve at polls.

“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “There has to be. Elections are one of the most important things a county does.”

The audit largely focuses on technical and management issues within the vast operation, which also tracks campaign spending, records property transactions and issues marriage licenses and death certificates.

The report paints a picture of an elections operation overwhelmed.

In November’s election--with 63% turnout, slightly higher than usual--2.5 million ballots were cast in the county. The registrar-recorder used 23,000 poll workers. The office was swamped with requests for information on election day; the server for the link on its Web site enabling voters to find their polling places crashed, and thousands were unable to get through via telephone to obtain information from overwhelmed staffers.

The audit warns that the next line of defense to go may be poll workers. In the March primary, auditors state, the office was not able to recruit enough temporary help to serve as backup for any volunteers who do not show up at their posts. That is in spite of what auditors praised as “innovative” efforts by the registrar-recorder to bolster the aging poll worker staff with high school and college students, among other efforts.

Still, the audit warns that the office has no strategic plan for recruiting workers. Eventually, auditors predict, “the county could find itself in a reactive position, forced to draft county employees or reduce poll site staffing to the point where minor polling problems are not addressed in time or at all.”

Some of the solutions auditors lay out for the projected shortfall, such as boosting stipends for poll workers from $75 to $200 or more, would be costly. Others, like reducing the number of workers at each station, might lead to the remaining volunteers being overwhelmed, election officials say.

The self-described most “radical” suggestion is establishing voting centers, a few centralized locations where people could travel to vote. Since this would be such a change from the current arrangement, in which nearly 5,000 polling stations are scattered around the county in churches, schools and garages, auditors recommend a phased-in approach.

They also found that Los Angeles elections are costlier than those in other counties, which may be attributable to the size of the electorate here.

Petrucello said he believes that the increasing number of voters using “convenience” methods such as absentee ballots, coupled with the success of the county’s test of a touch-screen voting system, may take the pressure off poll workers.

He also said he did not believe the county would ever find itself in a situation similar to Florida’s, pointing out that some of the more notorious voting practices of that state, such as the “butterfly ballot,” are not used here.

“Things were done there that just are not done in L.A.,” he said.