PRESS EDITORIAL: The workers who make democracy work

Without them, democracy is nothing more than a concept, an idyllic notion about the people being in control of their government that is too impractical to be true.
  

We are referring to the citizens who volunteer to do the grunt work of democracy, the poll workers who make elections possible.

Last week, they accomplished something that will rank as one the great government achievements in American history: They facilitated an election in which more Americans than ever before voted—in excess of 150 million of them—under the unprecedented stress of a pandemic that threatened the health of voters and poll workers, an overwhelming volume of absentee ballots and the intense scrutiny of politicians eager to pounce on real or imagined irregularities.

Democracy worked because of their work.

In Ozaukee County, where voter turnout in some precincts exceeded 90%, new poll workers took the places of some older volunteers who opted out because of coronavirus fears and contributed to a smooth voting process.

 Local government officials who are often under appreciated— our city, village and town clerks—trained their poll workers expertly and guided them in tasks made more complicated by the exigencies of the pandemic.

Across the country, citizens, many of them young, volunteered to fill the pandemic-depleted ranks of poll workers. Nearly three-quarters of a million people signed up to work at voting sites through Power the Polls, a group comprised of nonpartisan civic organizations and corporations. Hundreds of thousands more joined them to do jobs that, while essential to the glory of democracy, were far from glamorous.

In large cities in particular, these volunteers worked long hours at tedious tasks with demanding security requirements and intense supervision from not only election officials, but also poll watchers from both major political parties.

Beyond the nitty-gritty of poll work, volunteers in an election with such huge numbers of Americans participating had to engage with people who were voting for the first time in their lives and guide them through the process. Resulting images of college students helping elderly first-time voters belong in a scrapbook of the American democracy.

Overall, the contribution of civic-minded volunteers to the election process resulted in a bright picture of a working democracy, yet a shadow creeps over its edges—the attempts to demonize poll workers as perpetrators of election fraud.

Facebook and Twitter, as has come to be expected, delivered conspiracy theories posing as facts—thousands of ballots were dumped, lost, altered, hidden, not counted, counted twice and so on. There was ample malice in these allegations, but no evidence and no truth. It was easy work for fact-checking organizations to expose them as false claims. Yet they continue to be broadcast through social media networks.

In Wisconsin, postings on social media and various websites claimed, among other indictments of poll workers, that: 100,000 ballots were dumped; more ballots than the number of registered voters were counted; poll workers took a long break from counting to allow ballots to be stolen or discarded; the governor stopped the vote counting in some areas to influence the outcome. Every claim was investigated and found to be false.

Though the scenarios differ, the election fraud accusations in these malign fantasies say the same thing: The ranks of poll workers are infected by criminals who took an oath, violated it and broke the law. It is a slur on election volunteers everywhere, whether in densely populated metropolitan areas or the small communities of places like Ozaukee County.

The contrast between the citizen volunteers who came forward to serve their country in its most important mission and the conspiracy peddlers who impugned their motives from the safe and anonymous places where their computers reside is vivid and ultimately redemptive for the nation.        

That creeping shadow is too weak to dim the brilliant achievement of an election that gave a voice to 150 million Americans.