Beaufort Co. Election Day volunteers not tapped to help absentee voters. Why?
This is the moment Deborah Deignan, 69, has been waiting for. Retired and having nothing but time on her hands, the Moss Creek resident signed up to be a poll worker for this year’s general election in Beaufort County.
After completing training and a test, she was approved to work the polls Nov. 3, Election Day. But she received no information about working the month beforehand, when droves of voters would show up to Beaufort County’s three absentee voting precincts to cast their ballot.
As of Monday, a record-breaking 41,452 absentee ballots had been returned to Beaufort County Board of Voter Registration and Elections. Voters have requested 46,936 ballots.
As she heard reports of long lines at the polls and an overwhelmed voting board staff, Deignan was confused. Here she was, ready to help, with no one accepting her cheap labor.
“I’m not doing anything right now,” Deignan told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. “Why are we waiting for one day of service when we could be of service now?”
She said she spent her career in corporate America, trying to solve problems facing massive institutions. She felt her services could be useful here. But the call never came.
Deignan is one of many asking questions. Others have contacted the newspapers saying they applied to be poll workers on Election Day and never heard back from the voter board. It’s frustrating, they say, because arranging for more volunteers to help guide voters through the polls would seem to relieve pressure on the strained voter board.
But the chair of Beaufort County’s voter board, Ron Clifford, says it’s not that simple.
“We’re just totally inundated with voters and people trying to get absentee ballots and so forth, and if we get some people that have no experience whatsoever and they want to help — that’s great,” Clifford said. “But what can they help do? Unless we have time to sit down and train them on what we need them to do. And we really don’t have time to be training brand new people at this point.”
Clifford said the voter board has 600 people signed up to work on Election Day across Beaufort County’s 95 precincts. Each precinct gets six poll managers, who can choose to either volunteer their services or earn $120 for participating in training and for working election day. Each of the three absentee voting precincts is assigned about six poll managers, Clifford said.
“We just don’t have 600 jobs for them to do until Election Day,” he said.
With less than a week to go until the election, the voter board will not be considering additional poll worker applications, Clifford said.
Training hundreds of volunteers has become even more of a painstaking process during the COVID-19 pandemic, Clifford said. For starters, the training is over Zoom, which presents challenges to less technologically savvy volunteers. Only 35 people can attend a Zoom training at a time, Clifford said, so voter board staffers are frequently tied up with the training.
The state has also issued new voting equipment to Beaufort County, Clifford said, and each Election Day precinct’s clerk must receive hands-on training in time for the election. But only 10 of them can do it at a time due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“It’s just a nightmare trying to get all of this done by Zoom, and you can’t put people in a room because of all the COVID-19 regulations and rules and stuff,” Clifford said. “It’s just five times harder than a regular election should be.”
Clifford admitted that the voter board did not expect to have so many absentee voting requests this year. Even in a normal year, Clifford said, the general election squeezes their nine-person staff, tasked with handling the hundreds of voter questions, complaints and concerns that arrive each day.
Deignan isn’t satisfied with the explanations. “It just doesn’t make common sense to me,” she said. “I expected that to free up these tech people, some of us grunt people could sort things out.”
