Whether you plan to vote early, in person on election day, or by mail, casting your ballot won’t take much time. The process is simple — you show up to a polling location, check in with poll workers, fill out a ballot, feed your ballot into a voting machine, get your “I voted sticker,” and go on your merry way.
But hundreds of thousands of poll workers work for weeks to ensure elections across the country are carried out securely.
Meet Susan Rockwell, a Lexington resident since 1955, Lexington High School class of 1963 graduate, and poll worker for the past 10 years. You may recognize her name if you live in precinct one or five and vote at Lexington’s school administration building — that’s where she’s stationed on election day.
A retired attorney, Rockwell has spent much of her adult life volunteering in town. She served as the chair of the Cary Lecture Series and the 300th anniversary of Lexington event, has been a part of the Historical Society since 1988, and is now on the board of the Council on Aging.
While Rockwell was working for the town’s Historical Society in 2014, Donna Hooper, Lexington’s Town Clerk from 1996 to 2016, asked Rockwell if she’d consider being a poll worker.
“I had never really thought about it,” Rockwell said. “When Donna asked me…I thought, ‘gee yeah that sounds like a good thing to do and hopefully it’s helpful to the town.’”
Rockwell told LexObserver that Hooper would recruit residents to be poll workers “if she thought they could handle it.” But you don’t have to be recruited to work the polls — you can apply to be a poll worker through the town’s website. You must disclose your party on the application because under state law, wardens and clerks at each polling location — the presiding election officers — must be of different political parties. It’s the town’s goal to equally represent voters’ political makeup among wardens and clerks.
Mary de Alderete, Lexington’s Town Clerk, told LexObserver poll workers must attend training sessions which she leads before they can manage polling stations. The town pays workers a “small stipend” for their service, Rockwell said.
Rockwell’s duties began three weeks ago when poll workers mailed about 9,000 mail-in ballots to residents, which voters will mail back to de Alderete to be counted. Since Saturday, Lexington’s poll workers have been managing early voting at Cary Hall, which will run through Nov. 1.
By the end of Saturday, 338 residents voted, “which was really a lot,” Rockwell said.
“There is definitely a lot of interest in the election, not only for the [candidates] but for the questions,” she said.
When managing elections, poll workers arrive at polling stations an hour early to set up signs, voting machines, and poll pads which are used to check residents in before they vote.
In addition to dividers that create privacy for voters while they fill out their ballots, every polling station has an autoMARK accessible voting machine for disabled voters thanks to President George W. Bush’s 2002 Help America Vote Act. Those machines can enlarge print, read ballot questions through headphones, and have braille keypads. Rockwell said poll workers at each location can help disabled voters use those machines.
Poll workers won’t rest until the end of the night on Nov. 5, election day.
Once the polls close, poll workers will physically take all the ballots out of the boxes that the voting machines dropped them into and segregate write-in votes which must be separately recorded by hand on a special form, Rockwell said. Whatever ballots that, for whatever reason, did not go through the machine, must be hand recorded.
Next, poll workers make sure the number of people who checked in matches the number of ballots.
“Then we basically do a lot of paperwork,” Rockwell said.
The public is welcome to watch ballots get counted.
At the end of the night, each stations’ warden brings their tally to the town office building so de Alderete can report Lexington’s votes to the state secretary. Police take the actual ballots and voting machines.
“Everyone pitches in and everyone has a piece of the job to do at the end of the day,” she said. “Everyone really…wants to make sure they’re doing a good job.”
The 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history,” government and industry officials told the Associated Press.
Yet former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters claim the 2020 election was fraudulently stolen from him. He has spread conspiracy theories that voting machines were built in Venezuela at the direction of President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013; machines were designed to delete or flip votes cast for Trump; and the U.S. Army had seized a computer server in Germany that held secrets to U.S. voting irregularities, AP reported. None of those claims were substantiated or corroborated.
Former poll workers from Fulton County, GA, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, faced threats of violence from conspiracy theorists after live-stream footage of them on election night proliferated online among Trump supporters, ABC news reported. Those election deniers, including Trump and his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, alleged Freeman and Moss exchanged a USB drive meant to manipulate votes in that footage. Freeman told ABC they were exchanging ginger mints she kept in her purse. Giuliani has since been disbarred in New York for spreading lies about the 2020 election, NBC New York reported.
Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss led to federal criminal charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty, and a split with his vice president, Mike Pence. Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, has said that Trump did not lose the 2020 election.
Asked if poll workers are facing backlash because of Trump’s conspiracies, Rockwell told LexObserver she has not experienced any and is not worried about that in Lexington.
“My theory is that it really doesn’t affect Massachusetts because everybody knows what Massachusetts is going to do,” she said.
Rockwell said Lexington’s poll workers test “every single voting machine before they go to the precinct,” so she is confident the town’ machines are accurate.
“Our system is really secure, we have a lot of checks and balances in place,” she said. “We have a lot of confidence in the machines that we use and a lot of confidence in the people who have to handle them.”
Likewise, de Alderete has faith in Lexington’s poll workers’ ability to securely carry out this year’s election.
“I have complete confidence in Lexington’s poll workers to fulfill their duties in order to effectively conduct a well-managed, secure, and impartial election,” she told LexObserver.
Residents must register to vote online by Oct. 26 at 11:59 pm to vote in-person on Nov. 5, election day. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 29 at 5 pm.
Early voting will continue to take place at Cary Hall on the following dates:
- Wednesday, Oct. 22, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
- Thursday, Oct. 23, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
- Friday, Oct. 25, from 8:30 am to 1 pm
- Monday, Oct. 28, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
- Tuesday, Oct. 29, from 8:30 am to 7 pm
- Wednesday, Oct. 30, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
- Thursday, Oct. 31, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm
- Friday, Nov, 1, from 8:30 am to 1 pm
Residents who choose to vote on election day must do so at their precinct’s designated poll location, which can be found on the state secretary’s website. Those polling locations will be open from 7 am to 8 pm.
For more election information, visit Lexington’s town website, where you can find sample ballots, polling locations, hours and more.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the body of poll workers should be equal parts Democrats and Republicans. The article has been updated to state that wardens and clerks at each polling station must be of different political parties and it is the town’s goal to equally represent voters’ political makeup in its body of wardens and clerks.
As a poll worker, thx for the article, I thought it was going to be non-partisan, but unfortunately your rant against Trump is partisan rhetoric and really out of place.
I agree. The three paragraphs of anti-Trump rhetoric from recent college graduate Maggie Sales certainly detracted from the great information about Susan Rockwell and all of the amazing work that she has performed as a volunteer for our town and specifically her role as a poll worker.