Want a smooth election in Idaho? Consider giving your time to make sure it happens
Voting is open in many places around the state already, and Election Day is fast approaching.
It’s worth asking whether you have the time to do your part to contribute.
At few other times in American history have elections been more fraught. A staggering number of people have lost faith in them because of lies spread by former President Donald Trump and his sycophants. There have been efforts to prevent the certification of fair elections. And there have been other concerning occurrences.
In Arizona, there were six referrals to the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday for people allegedly engaged in armed voter intimidation. Shockingly, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that holding armed stake-outs at ballot boxes was legal in Arizona.
As Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights director Devin Burghart recently noted, gubernatorial candidate and serial criminal Ammon Bundy is encouraging his followers to sign up to act as official poll watchers (official observers on behalf of a campaign, as distinct from poll workers, who actually do the work of running an election).
That is his right as a candidate. But it also ratchets up the risks of some sort of stupidity at the polling places. Bundy’s associates have terrorized children at home alone, intimidated elected officials, busted through doors at the Capitol building, ended public meetings and shut down an emergency room.
And then there were the two armed standoffs with federal law enforcement.
So it’s a good time for good, ordinary people to become a bit more involved in the process of administering local elections. If you’ve been sitting, watching from the sidelines worrying about democracy, it might be worth spending a day ensuring that it functions smoothly.
You can do that by staffing at a polling station, doing the simple work of ensuring that voting laws are followed, helping people who wish to register and checking names and addresses while remaining politically neutral.
Your party doesn’t matter. Your ideology doesn’t matter. All that matters is your willingness to work a few long, boring hours for relatively low pay.
(You’ve also got to be willing not to talk about politics or distribute flyers or other such foolishness. You’ll get in trouble if you do that.)
No matter where you live in Idaho, you can pretty much guarantee that your county elections office is hurting for poll workers. It’s a role that’s often filled by older members of the community, especially older women, and a sad fact is that there will always be a year when someone who has long worked in a polling place doesn’t show up again.
So county clerks always need new volunteers to show up and help run polling places.
You can apply directly on the Idaho Secretary of State’s website.
You can come to learn the essential truth about elections in Idaho and around the country: finding out who won is exciting; everything else is utterly mundane.
But it’s also some of the most important work we do as a nation.