The city’s embattled Board of Elections is lobbying City Hall for $ 7.4 million to boost the salaries of its 36,000 temporary pollworkers – many of them party insiders – by $ 100.
The request, made last week to the City Council for the budget year that begins July 1, would raise the pay for the average pollworker to $ 300 for a 15-hour day, and hike the pay for supervisors to $ 400.
Pollworkers and supervisors also receive an additional $ 100 for six hours of training.
The board has been excoriated for running sometimes-chaotic elections that have left voters frazzled, frustrated, and, at times, disenfranchised. Board officials say raising the pay will help to attract more capable workers to staff elections.
Good-government groups say spending millions more on poll workers doesn’t get to the heart of the beleaguered board’s flaws – and a Daily News canvass of other major cities shows New York is already paying top dollar for Election Day staff.
Los Angeles pays poll workers $ 80 a day, while inspectors get $ 100. A “judge of election” in Chicago makes $ 125. And in Houston, temps are paid by the hour, with a day’s service yielding about $ 120 for workers and $ 145 for supervisors.
None of those cities requires their poll workers to spend a full 15-hour day at the polls. But poll workers in the five boroughs still make more, per hour, than just about every other major city.
“The easiest reaction for any bureaucracy is to say, ‘We need more money. We need more staff,’” said Neal Rosenstein of the New York Public Interest Research Group, which advocates an overhaul of the bipartisan Board’s poll operations, citing “poorly trained staff and conditions that would drive a business bankrupt.”
“Throwing money at the problem might get us a larger potential pool of workers – but that won’t necessarily mean better workers,” Rosenstein said. “What you need to do is build a better boat, not just keep bailing [out] the water.”
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About 40% of the city’s poll workers come from county political organizations. The rest are recruited online, from colleges, and at events from job fairs to block parties. Workers must pass a test to qualify – although the disconnect between the sky-high pass rates and performance at the polls has raised watchdog eyebrows.
Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan said city pollworkers haven’t had a raise since 2001, and that with the replacement of lever machines with electronic ballot scanners, the job is more complex.
Recruiting thousands of temps who can handle the job – and the public – with efficiency and grace is “a problem that I think money can partially solve, but money alone is not the answer,” he said.
Ryan said the board, which is working with consultants to improve training, agrees with advocates pushing to do what cities such as L.A. do when faced with a pollworker shortage: Recruit from the ranks of their own municipal employees.
Alex Camarda of Citizens Union said his group has raised that possibility with the de Blasio administration. For example, he said, teachers could serve as a built-in, educated, accountable workforce while making extra money for themselves.
Even with widespread recruitment efforts among the general public, “Most people who are really qualified workers are going to have full-time jobs that they’re going to. Maybe you get the educated [homemaker] or the retired senior citizen who’s a real asset at the polls – but the idea that you’re going to get 35,000 of those people, I think, is just not realistic,” Camarda said.
Simply tacking on an extra hundred bucks, he said, “is a marginal incentive that doesn’t address the real problem.”
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