Michael J.Ryan
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.
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.
