'It's My Civic Responsibility': Maryland Poll Workers Step Up for Election Day
Thousands of Marylanders will staff the polls on Tuesday. Capital News Service spent the last day of early voting with them in Gaithersburg — and with a Prince George's County worker who has done the job for nearly three decades.
GAITHERSBURG — On the last day of early voting last Thursday, nearly 40 poll workers at the Activity Center at Bohrer Park directed voters from one station to the next, checking them in, offering paper ballots or ballot-marking devices, pointing them to the scanners and handing out the stickers that say a ballot was cast. The Gaithersburg site, one of 102 early voting centers in Maryland, opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 8 p.m., Capital News Service reported.
The workers are a few of the thousands who will staff Maryland polling places again on Tuesday, in a midterm that drew a little more than 604,000 early voters in the state — nearly double the roughly 382,000 who voted early in 2022. For Delia Millet, who has worked the polls in Prince George's County for nearly three decades, the reason is simple. "I feel that it's my civic responsibility to partake in this process," Millet, 64, told Capital News Service. "Sometimes they have difficulties in finding people to volunteer, and I make certain that I volunteer when the time arises."
The job is trained, not improvised. Poll-worker candidates must pass a quiz before a three-hour in-person training session covering the duties at each station and how to operate the equipment, and officials say the stakes of staffing are national. "We would have a national crisis if people didn't serve as poll workers," said Thomas Hicks, a former chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, who added that officials are seeing presidential-type numbers for this midterm. Rick Reinhard, 71, who became a Montgomery County poll worker in 2020, said the training is why he trusts the count: the people who work the polls, he said, take the process seriously.
Montgomery County is also using the work to build the next crew. Gilberto Zelaya, the county Board of Elections' community engagement and public relations officer, joined the board in 2003 and a year later founded Future Vote, a program that lets middle- and high-school students serve as Election Day aides. On Tuesday those aides and the veterans beside them will open the polls at 7 a.m. across Maryland — and, as Millet put it, help everyone from elderly voters who need a hand walking to first-time voters who are excited to be there.
