When you go to cast your ballot in the 2022 midterm election on Nov. 8, the poll worker you see may be a veteran.
To date, Vet the Vote has recruited over 63,000 veterans and military family members to be poll workers for next Tuesday’s election, according to Air Force veteran Anil Nathan, an executive director of the nonprofit We the Veterans, which organized the effort.
“We’re incredibly proud of that accomplishment, from a coalition standpoint as well as seeing our community responding so strongly to their country asking them to step up and serve again,” he said during a press briefing on Friday.
Vet the Vote is a pro-democracy non-partisan coalition of 23 veteran and military service organizations, five civic groups, Power the Polls, the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and the National Football League (NFL) whose goal is to recruit 100,000 veterans and family members to serve as new poll workers.
“We hope that more people sign up to serve and they get exposed to the ways in which our elections are actually freely and fairly run,” Nathan said.
The COVID-19 pandemic and reports of threats of political violence have contributed to the nationwide poll worker crisis, according to the Vet the Vote coalition. Poll workers traditionally tend to be 60 years of age and older and election boards across the country have struggled to recruit enough volunteers. America needs to recruit more than 1 million volunteers annually to administer election polling sites.
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Poll workers play a vital role in elections by checking IDs (where necessary), making sure that voters have everything they need to cast their ballots, and ensuring that election signs are 40 feet from the door of the polling place.
Vet the Vote Civic Engagement Director Ingrid Sundlee said it defers poll worker training to local election boards.
“Our contact with our volunteers after their initial recruitment is we do regular emails to make sure they’ve completed their application, ask if they’ve followed up with their local election boards to ensure their application has been processed and we ask have you been trained,” she said.
The volunteer poll workers can also opt to purchase t-shirts that say Vet the Vote on them.
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“We hope those shirts can inspire conversations about service and serving again at the polls and also serve as a marker that this person is a veteran,” said Sundlee.
Nathan said the effort can also serve to bolster election integrity in the minds of the American public.
“We hope that’s true and that the strength of our community and the general non-partisan respect that the veteran and military family community has in America will be a bit of a bridge in how people think about the election process,” he said.
Nathan said the organization hopes to make it a “new norm” for veterans and family members to be poll workers.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.