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Election Workers Hard To Come By In Some Areas; Dickinson County Is Bucking The Trend

October 10, 2022 Steve Schwaller

(Spirit Lake)– Poll worker recruitment continues in many areas of Iowa ahead of next month’s midterm election. Secretary of State Paul Pate…

“We need about 10,000 to manage all of the sites across the state, and when we were in the middle of the covid epidemic, we planned, again, for the worst. We wanted to make sure we were protecting some of our oldest poll workers because at that time we were told they were the most susceptible, so we put a big push out.”

Locally, Jordan Moyer who oversees elections in Dickinson County, says it’s a much different story…

“I think a lot of people want to be part of the election process and being able to be part of something that is so big in our county as well as our state I think is where we’re fortunate in finding those people that are willing to work. And, you know, a big thing too is precinct workers don’t understand it is a paid position as well. And, you know, a lot of problems that people are having too is that we have to remain party-balanced when we have an equal number of Democrats and Republicans and we can also have people that are no party as well. We just have to make sure that we are party-balanced.”

In fact, Moyer says they have a waiting list of people interested in working at the polls…

“We have, you know, five locations for our elections and for each location that we have open we have to have a minimum of three people, but that’s sometimes where it gets tricky. But usually when we get to be around the primary and general elections is where we have a substantial amount of people that are submitting to be interested in being a precinct worker.”

That once again is Jordan Moyer of the Dickinson County Auditor’s Office.

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