| Posted on Thu, Oct. 24, 2002 |   |
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On Election Day, the ''poll worker'' helping at your neighborhood precinct might be Miami-Dade County's procurement director, or the deputy director of the transit department, or some other county bigwig. Your eyes aren't playing tricks and your imagination isn't running away. Those executives -- normally in charge of multimillion-dollar departments with dozens of employees -- will oversee the county's 553 polling places as Miami-Dade makes a last-ditch effort to correct Election Day problems that have stumped voters and made the area instant fodder for the likes of Leno and Letterman for the past two years. ''It's great the county is taking these measures to make sure every vote is counted,'' said Roosevelt Bradley, assistant transit director. In that job, he's in charge of operations and maintenance of the county's massive fleet of buses and trains. But on Nov. 5, he will be in charge of Precinct 205, a polling place near the Miami-Dade/Broward border that serves close to 1,000 voters. He's not alone. That day, 1,949 of his colleagues will be in a similar role, under a county plan in which each polling place is staffed with at least three county employees, a mix of managerial and technical workers known as ``The Triangle.'' The term refers to the three-person team that will be responsible for making sure that voting procedures go smoothly. That team consists of the quality assurance manager (department directors and managers), technical support specialists (computer technicians, programmers and Web designers) and verification specialists (administrative support personnel who regularly use computers). WORK TO DO Among their duties: making sure on Nov. 4 that their precinct is set up properly and that they have adequate staffing. The next day, they will help open and close the precincts and step in to assist voters if needed. Perhaps most important, they will start the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines and work the laptop computers to verify a voter's eligibility. County employees also have been trained -- to varying degrees -- to do minor repairs on the machines should something go wrong. It was those chores that tripped up many clerks on Sept. 10, delaying many precinct openings and causing some voters to walk away in frustration. Under the new system, the traditional election workers -- clerks, inspectors and deputies -- have fewer technical duties. Instead, they will focus on what they did prior to Sept. 10: showing voters how to cast their ballots and assisting in the event of ''special situations'' -- voters who lack IDs or whose names aren't in the precinct register or who challenge someone else's right to vote. The new program more clearly defines the roles of poll workers and of the county employees. That was one of the recommendations by county Inspector General Chris Mazzella, who reported on what went wrong leading up to the primary election. The Triangle system puts greater responsibility for overall operations on county employees. For instance, the technical support specialists will take the devices that store the votes to the collection centers when precincts close. That duty previously belonged to the clerk and assistant clerk. And the new system places the quality assurance person in charge of it all. Bradley, who went through eight hours of training on Monday, said he's conditioned for such tasks. ''I'm already in a service-related area. Every day we move more than 250,000 people,'' he said. ``I'm ready to go.'' 3,000 WORKERS About 3,000 employees have been tapped for poll duty, or as reserves in case of emergency. The plan has pulled bodies from every county department, large and small. Take, for instance, the Office of Cultural Affairs, which has 17 staffers. Director Michael Spring said 10 of those are working polls that day. He will be the quality assurance person at Precinct 114, St. Lawrence Church in North Miami Beach. ''When you work in the cultural community, the concept is to be a good citizen. We're committed to doing a good job for the citizens,'' Spring said. The new plan has changed the lexicon at County Hall, where conversations are peppered with references to PEBs, QAs, troubleshooters, zero tapes and other tasks that were foisted on employees. The idea for utilizing Miami-Dade man and woman-power was devised by County Manager Steve Shiver about nine days before Mazzella's report was released. It was sometime after midnight of Sept. 11, Shiver said, when he realized the county needed to install in the precincts people who are experienced problem-solvers and have a certain amount of technical savvy. And from all indications, the Triangle is the shape of what's to come for subsequent elections. ''It can't be just the Elections Department. That's why we're developing an entirely new process,'' Shiver said. Elections experts around the United States seem to agree with that assessment, as governments move toward high-tech forms of balloting. ''It's important that Florida and the cities look at how they coordinate their voting systems. You can't drop a bunch of high-tech equipment in polling places and expect them to come on and work,'' said Rashad Robinson, a field director at the Center of Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C. But privately, some of Miami-Dade's estimated 29,000 employees are less than happy about Shiver's mandate that they add election tasks to their job descriptions. More than 40 complaints have been filed with the American Civil Liberties Union of Miami, said president Lida Rodriguez-Taseff. She would not identify the employees. ''They're upset about being forced to work the polls on Election Day,'' Rodriguez-Taseff said. She said one employee had wanted to take a personal day to campaign for a candidate but had to cancel his plans. Evidence of the plan's impact appears in small and big ways. Miami-Dade's beleaguered elections office, under fire for its poor performance last month, has focused more on retaining experienced poll workers and preparing county employees than on recruiting new workers for the general election. FOCUS ON EMPLOYEES ''We're not depending on citizens to get us through Nov. 5. . . . We're also recruiting county employees,'' Elections Supervisor David Leahy said.
The Miami-Dade Elections Department is running ads for citizen poll workers, but from all indications, recruitment has not been its top priority. So far, the plan has received nods from some Miami-Dade commissioners, who have vowed to scrutinize every move that county administrators make in preparing the election. ''I feel confident that utilizing our employees will help us to ensure that people can vote,'' said Commissioner Dennis Moss, head of the county's Elections Oversight Task Force. Rodriguez-Taseff, who belongs to a coalition of community organizations that have monitored other Nov. 5 preparations, said the group has not taken a position on The Triangle. ''We haven't made a big deal about it because we were told this was implemented because of time constraints,'' she said. ``But I don't believe it's a good blueprint on how to conduct elections.''
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