Yesterday morning I attended a mandatory three hour training session for election judges in anticipation of the election next month. I should mention that in Chicago an ”election judge” is someone who works at a polling place on election day. We will, yet again, have new equipment and new procedures to deal with.
I’ve been working as an election judge for 20 years and have attended I don’t know how many training sessions. This was the worst by a significant margin.
The trainers were a man and a woman, employees of the Cook County Board of Election Commissioners. They were quite obviously very defensive, reluctant to answer even reasonable, timely questions, and didn’t appear to be a great deal more familiar with the equipment or procedures than we were.
The woman was good enough but the man was very, very poor. He was tall, extremely fat, and apparently had some sort of inferiority problem (which stood to reason because he was inferior). He was peremptory, imperious, antagonistic, churlish and took pains to belittle every question and questioner.
For example, after receiving information during a “hands-on” session from an assistant trainer that conflicted with what I believed to be the case. I asked (in clear, dispassionate terms) for a clarification and was told, sneeringly, “I’ve already covered that; weren’t you paying attention?” Apparently, the assistant trainer hadn’t been paying attention: I was correct. I wonder. If the trainers can’t get the information straight how do they expect those they are training to do so?
I asked a number of other perfectly reasonable questions and received similar treatment at his hands. Other judges at the training session noted to me that I was asking the right questions at the right time. The surly trainer got into arguments with other election judges, too.
I don’t see why someone who obviously doesn’t have the temperament for training should be a trainer. It casts discredit on the Cook County Board of Election Commissioners and the entire process.
On election day election judges work a grueling 14 hour day, wrestling with poorly built and designed equpment that frequently malfunctions, and dealing as diplomatically as we can with voters who are quick to blame us for things that are beyond our control. We don’t even receive minimum wage for our work. The reality is that we are volunteers who do the work out of a sense of civic duty. I know that I am.
This is no way to encourage volunteers.
