Full-time Peoria city employees now have the opportunity to take a paid day off to serve as election judges.
The Peoria City Council on Tuesday approved an administrative policy that provides eight hours of normal wages for workers appointed to serve as an election judge for any primary, general, consolidated or special election.
“We’re not anticipating we're going to see 50, 60 or 70 employees take this up. We might get two or three, or four, or five,” said City Manager Patrick Urich. “But that's really just looking at this as another opportunity to encourage civic participation.”
Peoria County Election Commission executive director Jessily Joseph said the county’s 56 polling places require six judges apiece to be fully staffed. She said the election day work shift typically exceeds 15 hours.
“One of the largest barriers that we hear about is being able to get time off work, but also to be able to afford it,” said Joseph. “We pay our judges $250, which currently is a trip to the grocery store for a family.
“It is what it is, but we are trying to recruit more because we want our elections to go as smoothly as possible.”
Joseph said Peoria County put a similar policy in place two years ago, but less than 10 current election judges are county employees.
The vote to adopt the policy was 8-2, with council members John Kelly and Alex Carmona opposing. Kelly said he’s “not too keen on this idea” of using the paid day off as an incentive.
“Our employees right now are free to take one of their paid time off days and do this,” said Kelly. “This, to me, partially opens the door to all sorts of good causes, where we’ll give people paid time off to do this good thing and that good thing and this other good thing.”
“‘Why not? It's a good cause.’ The ‘why not’ is because we need to get the work done at City Hall.”
“I don’t look at it as an extra benefit so much to the employee, but helping to solve a problem that we’re having with the lack of election judges,” said Mayor Rita Ali.
Before being eligible to serve, election judges need to complete 3-4 hours of in-person training and another four hours of online training. Those hours would be on a city employee’s own time and are not compensated.
Council member Mike Vespa said when you factor the full time commitment involved with being an election judge with the $250 the election commission pays, it works out to slightly more than $11 per hour — while having to use a vacation or personal day.
“And we're surprised that we have a lack of election judges?” Vespa asked rhetorically. “This is a civic duty; this is community service, it’s one of the highest there is.
“This is addressing a serious community need in the city, and it's noble, and to me it makes sense.”
Other council members also viewed any step in helping address the election judge shortage as worthwhile.
“Everybody's situation is very different when it comes to how much time you've used, how much you may have to use, and not even anticipating family emergencies that could come up on a whim,” said council member Denise Jackson.
“This is not just happening in the state of Illinois or in Peoria; this is happening, like, nationwide,” council member Bernice Gordon-Young said of the dearth of election judges. “So it's good to see that we are trying to reduce the shortage and get people to be more civically engaged.”
