Early voting has busted records this election. And with many voters eager to find another way to help the elections process, Bay Area counties say they have also had an overwhelming number of volunteers sign up to work the polls.
“It’s a problem that I thought we would never, ever, ever have,” said Contra Costa County Assistant Registrar Scott Konopasek. “We got hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who came out of the woodwork… we still have 4-500 people who volunteered that we were not able to use.”
He says he has never seen interest this high before, and he is not alone. Elections officials in all nine Bay Area counties have reported a deluge of volunteers. Marin County has 1,000 backup volunteers, Solano County received 125% of the volunteers they need and Alameda, Santa Clara and San Francisco county officials have also said they received many more poll workers than they can use.
In addition to the high response, the pandemic has shifting how voting sites are run.
“Since we mailed out so many vote by mail ballots and we had all the COVID restrictions, in terms of spacing and room capacity, we didn’t need as many people at each location,” explained Konopasek.
By Monday the county had already received 65 percent of mail in ballots back. Konopasek expected another 20 percent to be filed today.
“I don’t think [polling places] are gonna be as busy as what they historically have been on a presidential, general election,” he predicted. “I would say not more than 50-60,000 people at the polls, as opposed to two or three times that, that we normally would have expected.”
That means voters today may not face long waits as they have in the past, although Konopasek says lines may look longer than they really are because of social distancing rules.
