Poll work’s all in the (county) family

Annie Luong (left), Analie Pitallano and Reggie Tuyay were on the county election team.

It was closing in on 10 p.m., and Russ Guiney had an after-hours drop to make in a church parking lot in Arcadia.

While his day job involves running the county Department of Parks and Recreation, on this particular evening Guiney was helping to transport precious cargo—ballots from one of the county’s 4,621 polling places—to the trucks waiting to take them to their final destination, the Registrar-Recorder’s office in Norwalk.

It takes an army to put on an election in a county as vast as Los Angeles, and many of the foot soldiers are county employees.

On Tuesday, 3,946 of them—from clerks to department heads—marched into action as voluntary poll workers, part of a larger group of 27,000 community and student workers needed to pull off a presidential election in which more than 2.3 million county residents cast ballots.

If you voted on Election Day, chances are you ran into one of them. Maybe they provided a tutorial in using the InkaVote machine—or even gave you a round of applause.

“A lot of the memorable moments came from the first-time voters who came in,” said Reggie Tuyay, a recreation service supervisor at Whittier Narrows Recreation Area who worked a polling place in South Pasadena on Election Day. “One of the things our table did is we started applauding the first-time voters.”

County workers must get approval from their supervisor in order to participate. High-ranking managers are required to take part or to recruit 5% of their workforce to do so. Everyone receives their regular county pay for the day, in addition to a stipend ranging from $105 to $175, depending on their assignment.

And there are some rewards that go beyond the financial.

“It was my first time doing it, and I really enjoyed it,” said Analie Pitallano, who ordinarily works as a victims’ advocate in the District Attorney’s office. “I loved seeing immigrants who’d just become citizens come in to vote. It was just so great. Parents brought in children to show them the process.”

Parks and Rec chief Russ Guiney at the polls

It’s not a cushy job—at least as far as the hours are concerned, with workers arriving before polls open at 7 a.m. and staying after they close at 8 p.m. to inventory the ballots and pack them up, along with the election equipment.

“When we got out at about 8:45, we found out that Obama had already won,” Pitallano said, who nevertheless said she’d happily do it again, in large part because of the interactions with the voting public.

“It was a long day, but I met so many people,” added Annie Luong, an administrative support staffer in Health Services.

“If you’re a people person, this is the job for you,” said Jacklyn Jorge, the program’s coordinator.

For the Registrar-Recorder’s office, bringing in county employees—under a program established by the Board of Supervisors in 2001 to combat chronic shortages of poll workers—has become an important part of staging elections across a sprawling territory.

“I think it’s become an essential part of our process because the county is so large,” said Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan.

It also provides a large pool of county-affiliated election observers. “It gives us the opportunity to hear from the county family what is going on out there,” Logan said.

And sure enough, the day after the election, department heads including Santos Kreimann of Beaches and Harbors, who’s currently serving as acting director of the county Assessor’s Office, were coming up to Logan to share what they’d seen.

Kreimann and Guiney, the head of Parks and Recreation, both said they welcomed a chance to spend a day working on the front lines of democracy—and getting the change in perspective that goes along with it.

“I enjoyed it, actually, because I wasn’t in charge,” Kreimann said.

Posted 11/8/12