More Poll Workers Recruited, But Training Proves Daunting

"I think we should do a lot more," said Robert J. Antonetti Sr., the Prince George's interim elections administrator. He added that many of the judges find the new technology "mind-boggling." The county has held training sessions almost nightly and twice on Saturdays, he said.

Virginia did not experience any problems on the level of Maryland's during its primary, but it has also worked to recruit more judges in anticipation of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election. Helping the recruitment was a grant received by the University of Virginia, which went toward training 80 students from U-Va. and Piedmont College to be poll workers.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections, said recruiting efforts also were greatly aided by a new state law that prevents employers from penalizing workers who want to serve as elections judges, by, for example, forcing them to use a personal day.

Virginia uses touch-screen machines in 105 of its 135 cities and counties, with the rest using optical-scan machines. The touch-screen machines, which have been the focus of concerns in Maryland and elsewhere, have been operated in at least one previous election in each jurisdiction that is using them, Jensen said.

In Maryland, training sessions for Montgomery's judges have been held six days a week and will continue through Monday afternoon, the day before the election, officials said.

Montgomery is more familiar with electronic voting than most Maryland jurisdictions because it was introduced to the technology in 2002 with Prince George's and two other counties.

Still, the training session last week revealed how difficult it is for some prospective judges to master such a large amount of material in a short time. The trainees struggled with a new vocabulary: voter access cards, USB port, local area network, GEMS server. After the trainer said using the electronic poll book -- the machine that repeatedly faltered during the primary -- was a lot like using a PDA, Goodman wondered what a PDA is. It's a personal digital assistant, such as a BlackBerry or PalmPilot, he was told.

Later, when the instructor, Belinda Lee, asked the class to plug in the ethernet line, some stared blankly at the tangle of wires in front of them until she told them it was the one that looks like a telephone cord.

"Oy vey!" an exasperated Goodman blurted out.

During a break, trainee Joseph Burke, 80, of Chevy Chase thumbed through the thick three-ring binder he will have to become familiar with before Tuesday.

"That's a lot of stuff they threw at us," he said. "It's going to take some more studying."

Anthony DiLullo, 67, of Bethesda was comforted only by the fact that another check-in judge would be working the polls with him Election Day. "I hope the other person knows more than I do," he said.

Some fear that the changes in the way elections are run might be driving longtime poll workers away.

"It's a nationwide issue, and particularly when you transition to new equipment you see that some of your traditional poll workers decide it's time to retire," said DeGregorio, of the Election Assistance Commission. "So it puts the election officials in a bind in trying to fill the polls."

Although most poll workers are retirees who don't have to sacrifice a day of work to work the polls, states across the country are reaching out to younger generations, who have grown up using computers.

In Chicago, 754 high school students have been recruited to work the polls. Those younger than 18 are allowed to work as judges under a state law designed to involve younger people in the voting process, according to a news release. The city has also trained 2,000 college students to work as technicians at every polling place to prevent the kinds of problems that affected the city's primary this March.

In Ohio, Cuyahoga County has turned poll worker training over to the local community college, which has extended sessions by an hour and limited the class sizes. People must pass a written exam before they can serve as poll workers on Election Day.

Staff writers Zachary A. Goldfarb, Rosalind S. Helderman and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.