HOT SPRINGS -- The Garland County Election Commission will have to muster more poll workers if legislation moving the state's presidential primary to March is enacted, a challenge complicated by public criticism of the commission after the 2014 election.
Senate Bill 389, sponsored by state Sen. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, passed in the Senate in a 20-5 vote last month but stalled in the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee. It would have moved the presidential primary from May to the first Tuesday in March, the same day a bloc of southern states are considering moving to in an effort to have greater influence on the nomination process.
Stubblefield said Friday that he was told by Gov. Asa Hutchinson that the bill will be on the agenda for the special legislative session he's considering convening this summer to address Common Core and the state's Medicaid program.
The bill keeps primaries for state and local offices in May, which means the commission could have to administer four elections next year. Runoffs would add to the total.
The commission said it has about 245 trained poll workers, with another 25 to 30 awaiting training. It said it needs about 300 for a primary election. Commissioner Ginna Watson said 321 worked last May's primary.
State law requires a minimum of four workers at each site, but the commission said most of the county's 24 locations need a minimum of seven. Some of the busier ones require more than a dozen.
The commission said its worker pool shrank after the November election, attributing the decline to older workers unable to man the polls for 12 hours on Election Day and an open letter claiming that poll workers were poorly trained.
The letter -- signed by Jim Fram, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce; Don Gooch, chairman of Fifty for the Future; and County Judge Rick Davis -- also cited long lines, reports of voters receiving incorrect ballots and absentee ballots not being tallied in a timely manner.
"All the problems of the last election and the letter to the editor, it ran some of our poll workers off," Watson said during the commission's Monday meeting. "We did have 325. When the minutiae started hitting the press, they started resigning."
Watson said poll workers took exception to the open letter's assertion that they were poorly trained.
"We had many that called down here and said, 'Oh, they are so wrong. How dare they say we're not trained,'" Watson said. "They got upset over that. They were angry."
Chief judges in charge of polling places bore the brunt of the criticism, Commission Chairman Gene Haley said. Several have asked off supervisor roles or quit altogether.
"This last election, they took all the flak," said Haley, a longtime chief judge at the Lonsdale polling site before the county's Republican Party Committee elected him to the commission this year. "You're not paying them enough to put up with that."
Chief judges receive $125 for what the commission said can be a 15-hour day that starts before the polls open at 7:30 a.m. A lengthy list of duties follows, including returning flash cards containing vote totals recorded by optical scanners and electronic voting machines to the election commission office after the polls close at 7:30 p.m.
In addition to ballots and electronic and hard-copy vote totals, chief judges are responsible for the extensive documentation required by election law.
"By the time they do their closing procedure, it could be another hour [after the polls close]," Haley said. "Then they have to drive in here. It could be 10 at night before they're done. For an older person, that's a long day."
Some poll workers said the 12-hour day prompted their departure, the commission said, noting that a larger pool of workers would allow more of them to work half-days.
Haley suggested posting sign-in sheets at polling places and the commission office for voters to sign up as election workers. The commission website that Fountain Lake EAST Lab students are building can also be a recruiting tool, raising the commission's online profile. Its Web presence is currently limited to contact information on the county's website.
The commission created the assistant chief judge position several years ago to groom new supervisors. Assistants scheduled to work at the election commission office during early voting for the May 12 Hot Springs School District special election will serve as chief judges at the three polling sites the school has requested for election day.
It's part of the program acclimating them to a supervisory role.
"We made a spot for assistant chief judges to put them into training for the future," said Watson, the longest-serving commissioner on the panel. "The program's been going on for a couple of years, and it's paying off."
The state doesn't mandate chief judge training beyond the two-hour course required of all poll workers. The commission held special training for chief judges and assistant chief judges before the November election.
State Desk on 04/07/2015