County Employees Elect to Volunteer for Polling Places

Gabriel Esquivel usually sits behind a desk monitoring financial information for Orange County. But on election day, Esquivel will join hundreds of other county employees who have volunteered as poll workers.

The goal is to help change the county’s reputation for chronic election problems. A plus for Esquivel, 38, is that he speaks Spanish and is willing to provide information in either English or Spanish during the March 5 primary.

“I offered myself as a volunteer,” Esquivel said. “And I intend to do whatever they want me to do.”

That includes working long hours. Program organizers at a training session Tuesday said county workers are expected to be at the polls by 6:30 a.m. with a positive attitude.

“We wanted to instill in the volunteers the importance of the vote, plus to instill a positive attitude,” said Steve Rodermund, chief deputy in the county’s Registration and Elections Department. “We don’t want anyone saying to potential voters who may be at the wrong polling place, ‘You don’t get to vote’ or ‘Go away.’”

Under the program, employee volunteers will draw their normal salaries plus a $50 stipend for helping to supplement the thinning ranks of precinct workers.

Election officials say the current pool of volunteers is aging, and younger people are not stepping forward.

The program, which will cost $119,000, is the latest in a series of changes for the elections department. In September, the county agreed to a $1.1-million budget boost to hire 13 additional employees and bolster a department criticized for problems during the Nov. 7, 2000, general election.

The county came under fire for problems that included 40,000 sample ballots being shipped late to Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking voters, the misidentification of a Libertarian candidate as a Republican on the ballot and a precinct that opened without any ballots.

In addition, Spanish-speaking voters in Santa Ana complained to community leaders that they were treated poorly or given misleading information.

For the March primary, the county is seeking not only Spanish speakers but also Vietnamese employees to work in Vietnamese neighborhoods.

With the election less than two weeks away, about 260 county employees have volunteered so far. Rodermund said the department’s hope is to recruit 1,700 volunteers by November.

Gary Burton, the county’s chief financial officer, was among the first to sign up.

“I think it’s a personal responsibility,” Burton said. “When the word went out that county employees were needed, I put my name down.”About 7,000 volunteers work at the county’s 1,716 precincts on a typical election day.

During Tuesday’s training session, organizers handed out copies of a pamphlet on ballot information, a guide for working the polls and tips on serving voters.

One of the themes emphasized by Rodermund, who led the session, was keeping personal sentiments in check and treating voters with dignity.

“Any time you have 7,000 people out there, you have the potential of someone allowing their biases to surface,” Rodermund said. “The last thing we want is a confrontation at the polling place.”