The post-mortems of the primary election problems have focused on glitches with the electronic voter registration computers and the voting cards they create. But an Annapolis hearing Wednesday about the prospects for the Nov. 7 general election centered on the long-standing difficulty of getting and keeping the lay election judges needed to run the polls.
Election chiefs from across Maryland told a Senate committee how difficult it was to recruit, train and keep the thousands of judges needed to run election in 1,776 polling places.
Barbara Fisher, election chief for Anne Arundel County, said she needs 2,000 election judges to staff 189 precincts. The day before the election, she still had 140 vacancies.
“Many will not be election judges when they realize the pay scale and the length of the day,” she said. The judges get $110 for a 15-hour day.
“The process has become too complicated,” said Fisher, who advocates creating one large polling place in each of Anne Arundel?s seven council districts, with the polls open over four or five days.
In Baltimore County, director Jacqueline McDaniel said she needed 3,280 judges to post at 218 precincts, and on election day she was 500 short.
“As soon as you hire them, they drop like flies,” McDaniel said, particularly the night before and the morning of the election.
“We?ve always had problems [getting] Republican judges,” she said. “In Essex and Dundalk, we never had problems getting Democratic judges,” but this month, “we were crying for them.”
Each polling place is supposed to have an equal number of judges from the two parties.
She listed many reasons judges, who tend to be older, have been harder to recruit: Elections have become more complicated; the technology is too difficult; there are too many last-minute changes in procedure; the day is long; and then there are the irate voters who show up, a complaint raised by other judges.
“We?ve always had problems recruiting Republican judges” in Baltimore City, where there are only 30,000 Republicans, said board President Armistead Jones. Manypolls in the area didn?t open on time due to a lack of judges.
