QUESTION
How is the New York City Board of Elections (NYC BOE) addressing concerns regarding poll worker appointments and increasing non-partisan recruitment?
3:49:31
·
4 min
The NYC Board of Elections details efforts to reduce reliance on political party recommendations for poll worker positions, emphasizing a shift towards independent volunteerism.
- Local political parties traditionally have the authority to recommend poll workers, but this is increasingly supplemented by independent volunteers.
- The share of poll workers coming from political party recommendations has decreased to 25-30%, with the majority now volunteering independently.
- Efforts to recruit outside of the politicized process include public outreach and targeting specific needs, such as language interpretation.
- The NYC BOE is open to collaborating on ways to enhance non-partisan poll worker recruitment and address any gaps in the process.
Lincoln Restler
3:49:31
And so I'd just like for you to explain on the record I had thought that the BOE empowered district leaders to make appointments in their assembly districts or their portions the assembly districts to recommend pool site workers for those areas.
3:49:45
Is that a formalized process?
3:49:47
And then relatedly, we were you know, we've recently seen in my county, the county leader designating district leaders that they don't get along with and not allowing them to make recommendations for close eyed workers.
3:50:02
It all seems like a bad outcome for voters.
3:50:06
How do we improve the could you explain the rules?
Michael J.Ryan
3:50:08
Absolutely.
3:50:09
So it's it's embedded in state statute that the local political parties have have input and authority about who gets recommended to be a poll worker.
3:50:22
In terms of removal as poll workers, I mean, to the extent that we have extra, I'll call them extra, not really extra, but extra poll workers in the system, some may get assigned to every election because they're really good, and some may get assigned only when they're needed.
3:50:37
And the commissioners have the authority to remove poll workers for cause irrespective of what the party may say.
3:50:45
Now the problem that you are raising has become a problem that has diminished over the course of time because with each passing year during my time here, and I don't think there's any correlation to it.
3:51:01
We have been seeing less and less poll workers coming from the parties.
3:51:05
And more and more poll workers coming from individuals that want to serve.
3:51:09
We were alarmed in a sense when we saw that number drop below 40% of of party people or party recommended people.
3:51:21
That's now down between 25 30%.
3:51:24
So the overwhelming majority of people that service coworkers in the city of New York come to us away from the formal party process.
Lincoln Restler
3:51:36
If you'd be interested, would love to work with you on ways to encourage outreach and recruitment outside of the party process.
3:51:46
If as you've testified that statutorily required for you to take input from the parties, then, you know, that's that should should re should be revisited.
3:51:58
But we wanna do everything we can to encourage people to be recruited outside of a politicized process.
Michael J.Ryan
3:52:08
So to the extent that you may have seen some of those efforts that we've made on the subways and such, that's all directed outside.
3:52:17
The the the the party process.
3:52:21
And if there's other things and other ways that we can do it, like for example, getting away from poll worker proper to to to interpreters which are a poll worker in a sense, we were seeing a shortfall for a number of years in Korean interpreters.
3:52:42
One of the things that we did was we had outreach with the various language specific communities, and we learned at least with the Korean community that we weren't conducting our outreach in the places that would be most effective at reaching Korean speaking peoples and the kinds of they have specific digital platforms that they access more regularly that we weren't targeting.
3:53:14
And when we did that, we started to target in those directions.
3:53:18
We started to see our shortfalls from of of Korean poll workers dissipate.
3:53:24
So again, going back to what we had said earlier, If we're missing something, we're happy to, you know, work collaboratively to overcome the hopefully very small tiny holes in our process, but work in a way that is in the spirit of collegiality and cooperation.
3:53:47
So thank you.