I’ve worked the elections in rural Virginia since I moved here a couple of years ago, including the primaries. I also participate in voter registration drives.
Many states also allow you to work only 1/2 the day. I’m in my second decade of working, and I only work the last half of the day & closing.
That may not help them, in most states.
The Certification has to happen by a specified date. If a district isn’t certified by then, they just don’t get counted. Republican election boards are most likely to be in charge in red districts. So if they refuse to certify their red district, the overall result is that the state as a whole has more blue votes certified. If enough did that, it could flip a state blue!
I’d worry more about this happening where the state-wide officials (Secretary of State) is Republican, and tries to find a way to not-certify the blue districts of the state. Like having fake ‘certifiers’ send in a competing certification saying that the blue district voted red, and having a Republican Sec’y of State counting that instead of the official election board certificate. (Rather like last time where some states sent in ‘fake electors’ to cast their states’ electoral college votes.)
Some of the new rules in Georgia don’t require Republicans to be in charge, just one or two meddling can get a whole precinct thrown out and not counted at all in the state’s final numbers.
Election officials have expressed concern about the new rule that prevents them from counting any ballots in a precinct if the number of voters checked in doesn’t align with the number of ballots cast.
So a person signs in, ends up walking out with their ballot instead of turning it in, and BOOM, discrepancy. Now they can just not count any votes in that precinct at all. Knowing this, what’s stopping Republican operatives in blue counties from doing just that? Sign in, but don’t vote. There’s no way to tell who voted or didn’t vote. It’s all anonymous. They can only tell if 1000 people signed in but they have 998 ballots.
I haven’t worked in an election but I do vote, every single time, in the primaries and general elections. I’m following the example of my maternal grandmother. She first voted in a presidential election in 1928, when she was not quite 24. Her last election was in 2012, not long before her 108th birthday. That could be a record. I never asked, nor did she, who we voted for, but I do remember a McCain Palin sticker on her wheelchair. I could have voted for him but that would have been a vote for Palin, so I went the other way.
Grandma was born one year to the day after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. Think of all the change she saw in a single lifetime.
Maybe I should find out about being an election worker.
Here in Minnesota, we can tell who voted: people have to sign in, get a receipt, then turn that in to get a ballot. We just can’t tell who they voted for.
And our head election judge checks every hour that all these counts match: number signed in, number of ballots given out, number of ballots in the counting machine – and if they don’t match, we all start immediately checking everything to find the discrepancy.
Plus there is a judge at the exit of the polling place – they would stop you if you tried to walk out with a ballot.