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A temporary workforce of regular Americans, the vast majority of whom are women, come together every couple of years to ensure a smooth election process. These elected officials, paid staffers, and volunteers — including many retirees and students — work at polling places and help process ballots.
How elections run, and voters cast those ballots, varies by state. In some states, mostly in the West, elections are overwhelmingly conducted by mail. In others, it’s a mix of early in-person, mail and Election Day.
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It takes around 1 million workers nationwide to staff a presidential election. It’s a job that is critical to the functioning of democracy — but one that changed after poll workers became the targets of coordinated disinformation, threats and harassment almost overnight in 2020.
But despite former President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on election administrators and poll workers, vast majorities of American voters have said they remain confident in their state and local election officials, according to a survey released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. And they should, according to Kate Everingham of South Carolina and Monica Williams of Utah, two volunteer poll workers who have seen the process works and want to demystify the process for any Americans who might have lingering concerns.
“We are very, very well trained. Every single poll worker here knows the law as it pertains to South Carolina. They’ve gone through multiple classes, and Charleston County keeps up with everything so we get trained again before every election,” Everingham said.
Monica Williams, 45 – Weber County, Utah
I feel like I’m contributing to a public good.”
Monica Williams
“Go see for yourself.” That’s what Monica Williams tells anyone who asks her about being an election worker.
“You can see that people who do this work — full-time staff and seasonal people like me — we really have a strong sense that upholds our own morals and ethics.”
Williams lives in Ogden, a city in Weber County and part of Utah’s 1st Congressional District, which serves the northern part of the Republican-leaning state that embraces mail-in voting. She first got her up-close look at the process in 2022 when someone she knew in the elections office asked her if she was interested in becoming a poll worker. “I always thought that was interesting to see how it all works, and so I said yes to that.”
Soon she was hooked, drawn in partly by a sociology background and an interest in “what goes on behind the scenes.” She said she was particularly interested in the “service aspect of the work.”
“I feel like I’m contributing to a public good, and we’re all trying to achieve the same goal: getting the ballots processed fairly and getting them through as quickly as we can,” Williams said. “But it also feels like you’re contributing to society.”
The former university professor in criminal justice said she welcomes talking to people who are skeptical so she can tell them how the process actually unfolds. “I understand when I put my ballot in the envelope, what’s going to happen to it — and that’s kind of cool,” Williams said
(Kim Raff for The 19th)
“The biggest thing is just go see for yourself. Don’t rely on snippets that you see in the media or what other people tell you. Go see the process, ask to be a poll watcher, or go and say, ‘Hey, I want to know how this works.’ And see it,” she said. “The amount of dedicated people that are coming in every day, and the amount of work it takes to process all of these ballots — and we’re not even a big county — just talk to people that are doing this work.”
Kate Everingham, 66 – Charleston County, South Carolina
We know we’re running fair and secure elections.”
Kate Everingham
Becoming an election worker is uniquely tied to a legacy of civic engagement – and her own citizenship journey for Kate Everingham.
“In 2017, when I became an American citizen, the League of Women Voters were in the same room offering people the opportunity to register to vote and to sign up to be a poll worker,” said the 66-year-old, who was born in England but spent much of her life in Australia and South Africa. “My father was an elected politician in England, and never lost an election. He had a servant’s heart, and he taught us that community service will make you happier as an individual, if you’re kind and show grace to your neighbors.”
Everingham resides in Mount Pleasant, a large suburb in Charleston County, which has leaned Democrat in the last four election cycles and saw record early turnout earlier this month. The county is located in the 1st Congressional District along the state’s coast.
Everingham said she’s “enjoyed every moment” of being administrative clerk at the Charleston County Board of Elections. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t misperceptions of the work she does that cause concern and sometimes frustration.
“The perception is wrongly that somehow you can change a vote, or the machinery is suspect, or that there’s a variety of conspiracies. And we do try and show voters that that is not true, certainly not in Charleston County,” she said. “But those out there with social media conspiracy theories, they’re quite disturbing and they upset us. We know we’re running fair and secure elections.”
As an example, Everingham cited someone walking up with their ballot, placing it on top of the scanner that will tabulate their vote and saying something like, “So this is the shredder?”
“Internally, I find that quite distressing,” she said. “Outwardly, of course, we’re assuring a voter that their vote will be tabulated, but somewhere in you, of course, you think, ‘If you really thought that, why are you here to vote?’ I mean, it’s a throwaway remark, but it’s kind of hurtful to a group of people who are giving up 11 hours a day for 12 days to help people take part in a free and secure election.”
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