On election day, you may take just a few minutes to go to your nearest polling place, make sure your registration is in order and cast your ballot. A handful of students from a Bradley University government class will be spending their entire day there to make that process go smoothly.
Freshman Tricia Gomez is both a first time voter and first time election judge in 2024.
“I had never gotten an opportunity like this before,” she said. “And I just thought it would be really interesting to try it out.”
Gomez says sign up was easy, she talked to the election commission, picked training times and registered. Election judges have to register as either a Democrat or Republican, as the commission looks to maintain a balance of partisan judges at any given polling place.
For example, Senior Gigi Prado is listed as a Democratic election judge. This is actually Prado's second time. She also judged in 2020.
“I just kind of did it to make a quick buck and that was that,” she said. “But now, after taking a government class and being a lot more, I don’t know, in touch with government, now that I’ve taken a class I actually wanted to take and learn more about, I feel like it’s a lot different.”
That "quick buck" is up to $200. Ironically, it's not that quick. Judges work a full election day shift, from 5 a.m. to whenever the polls are packed up after closing at 7 p.m.
Gomez went through an online and in-person training for the position. The online training entailed a series of videos and quizzes, covering the duties of the job and some deescalating tactics. The in-person session was more involved.
“You actually got to get hands-on with the equipment that you were going to use and the machinery, and going through different scenarios of what people might say and stuff like that,” Gomez said.
Prado says the main de-escalation tactic she learned from the course is backing out of a situation to go get a supervisor.
Though election season is typically fraught with concerns about voter intimidation and election security, Gomez and Prado both say their biggest concern is getting the small details of their role right.
Prado is judging a day of early voting.
“I guess I’m not counting the things, I’m just sitting there, making sure they’re verified, making sure they know what they’re doing and then kind of putting them in different piles,” she said. “But I’m just scared, like, am I gonna commit voter fraud? Am I gonna mess something up?”
To be fair, election judges have a lot of different jobs. They check voter qualifications, get them signed in, set up the election equipment, hand out the ballots, fill out various election forms and more.
As Gomez explains, the instructions can get very granular.
“For example, like, when someone doesn’t have the right identification, even though Illinois isn’t an ID state, you still have to, there’s different scenarios as to where you’d have to ask for their ID,” she said.
Some of those situations include when a voter is registering or changing their registration address, if someone registered for vote-by-mail without an ID, or if an Election Judge challenges the eligibility of a voter.
“You have to make sure that, you have to count your ballots, you have to make sure they’re in a specific order and you really can’t mess up that order, because you’ll be getting, you know, hundreds of ballots a day,” Gomez said. “And you have to always, like, if you’ve done a task of something, you always have to write your signature.”
It's a job that comes with a lot of responsibilities and a lot of accountability. But, both Gomez and Prado say that they believe it's an important one. Neither of them consider themselves more politically engaged than the average American.
Gomez is a criminology major, and says an interest in politics comes with an interest in law.
“It helped, definitely, with the way that I was raised,” she said. “My parents like to talk about politics and I’m sure a lot of other families do too.”
Prado says she primarily interacts with politics through social media, but has found herself having more conversations with friends and family about voting this year, reminding them to get registered or vote early.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t think their vote counts,” she said. “But that’s what makes it count, if everyone believes that their vote counts, if everyone gets out to the polls, does early voting, there’s a huge difference that it can make.”
Both Prado and Gomez say they feel prepared for election day. WCBU will be following up with them after November 5th.
