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Kira Lerner and Indrani Basu write to us today about how, amid the pandemic, US poll workers risked their health to run the elections:
On November 5, two days after Election Day, a clerk from the Onondaga County, New York Board of Elections office went home early. She was feeling drained, according to Election Commissioner Dustin Czarny, and assumed long shifts were to blame.
A week later, she was hospitalized, tested for Covid-19, and learned that she had contracted the virus. By then, unbeknownst to other employees, the virus had spread to the office where staff worked long shifts to count absentee ballots before New York’s certification deadline. Approximately 200 employees and volunteers who counted absentee votes were sent home on November 13 and asked to take the test. In all, 12 employees tested positive.
“We had almost everyone in the office last week before Friday the 13th,” Czarny said. “Of course all this happened on Friday the 13.”
Czarny and the other commissioner closed the office and stopped counting votes for the week, informing New York that they would not meet the November 28 certification deadline. Czarny said the crisis is exactly what he hoped to avoid while managing an election amid a pandemic.
“This is what we feared and it happened,” he said.
For local election officials, the 2020 election was guaranteed to be a fight. A record number of voters requested absentee ballots due to the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing election administrators to adjust to an unprecedented election. Officials had to hire additional staff, find warehouses and other places to store the ballots, and purchase protective gear to ensure their staff remained healthy and safe.
Despite their best efforts to stop the spread of the virus, several dozen poll workers and election officials across the country have tested positive for Covid-19, although the link to Election Day in most cases is missing. Clear. According to a Votebeat analysis of local reports, there were cases of Covid-19 among poll workers in at least nine counties in five states before Election Day, and at least 24 counties in 14 states reported positive cases among poll workers in the days and weeks later. .
These cases represent only those that received media coverage and could be attributed to an electoral operation. The actual number of such cases is likely to be much higher, given the severity of the virus.
Read more about Kira Lerner and Indrani Basu’s report here: Amid the pandemic, American poll workers risked their health to run the elections.
