November 17, 2022
In the War Against Voting, Poll Workers Are on the Front Lines
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
During the 2022 midterms, election officials faced an unprecedented level of harassment. After the Republicans’ poor performance, antidemocratic conspiracies will only become more prominent.
By Zurie Pope
During the midterm elections, millions of polling stations operated across the United States, helping citizens register to vote and submit their ballots. The state of Ohio alone held hundreds of stations, with dozens often located in a single county. For the average person, a polling station is the most accessible representation of democracy, and these locations couldn’t function without the teams of overworked and underappreciated poll workers staffing them.
Linda Williams has been a poll worker in Ohio for 42 years, usually working out of a senior center in the suburban neighborhood of Forest Park. She thinks her profession’s role is to transcend politics. “When you’re in the polling location,” said Williams, “kind of make it a neutral zone.” Even so, Williams enjoys being part of the process. “When issues come about, I’m able to help solve the issue.” One hour away, Pat Brown, a first-time poll worker, tabulated votes inside Langsam Library, which serves as the polling station for the University of Cincinnati and its surrounding neighborhood, Clifton. Brown sees poll workers as a reassuring presence for prospective voters. Far from being unknown government officials, polling station staff are often ordinary people—neighbors, friends, and colleagues. “It’s beautiful,” said one poll worker exiting the polling station in St. Mark AME Zion Church. “These people have known each other for years.”
But since 2016, Donald Trump and his allies have spawned a culture of paranoia, fear, and resentment against the electoral process, resulting in threats toward poll workers like Williams and Brown. Election officials now face unprecedented levels of harassment, hate mail, and death threats. Allegations of fraud have created a cottage industry of far-right influencers spreading election denialism, centering their platform on Trump’s being the legitimate president. J.D Vance, the Trump-endorsed Republican who will become Ohio’s new senator in January, claimed that there was insurmountable fraud leading to Joe Biden’s presidential victory, accusing Mark Zuckerberg of “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states of mostly Democratic areas.”
