‘I wanted to serve my neighbors’

First-time election judges ‘anxious’ but ‘jumped right in’

Election judge and ballot-runner Annette Meyers selects ballots in Westminster at Winters Mill High School on Election Day. Jeffrey F. Bill/Staff

One minute, Miriam Burg was scrambling to find a Band-Aid for a voter with a minor cut; the next, she was helping another voter find an open booth.

“I really just want to make sure I’m getting everything right,” said Burg, a 50-year-old rabbi and a first-time voting judge who was stationed at Beth Am Synagogue, a polling station in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood.

“This is my precinct, my neighborhood, and I wanted to serve my neighbors,” Burg said. “What motivated me was finding ways to be of service.”

Elections officials across the nation braced for the potential of trouble, concerns heightened by bomb threats to polling stations in various states. The FBI said Tuesday that none of the threats were credible and that they were sent by Russian email domains.

In Baltimore, polling sites saw long lines and a few late starts at polling stations, but many poll workers said they otherwise had a relatively problem-free day of voting.

Baltimore City elections director Armstead Jones told The Baltimore Sun that “two or three” polling stations opened slightly late on Tuesday. But he said there have been no reports of violence or significant, improper electioneering at sites.

Even so, the threat of violence was on the minds of many overseeing the nation’s ballot count. State election officials have said they worried about recruiting enough people to serve as election judges.

“The national vitriol toward election judges did play into the recruitment of them. We did see some people just say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,'” said Jared DeMarinis, Maryland’s elections administrator. DeMarinis added that state legislation increasing judge’s pay and a bill the Maryland General Assembly passed to criminalize threats to elections officials counteracted much of that concern.

“I think that helped assuage any fears of being harassed in a polling place while they’re performing their jobs,” he said.

This spring, a Brennan Center for Justice survey of local elections officials found that more than half were concerned for their safety and that of their colleagues. Thirty-eight percent reported that they had been threatened, harassed or abused.

More than 90% of local elections officials reported increasing security measures for voters, workers and voting infrastructure since 2020, according to the Brennan Center. The U.S. Department of Justice has reported 20 cases of criminal, elections-related threats across the country as of last month. Christine Mitchell, chief election judge at the Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School voting site in Locust Point in Baltimore, said some first-time judges were worried about the potential for trouble leading up to the election. Four of the nine judges at this location were first-time judges, Mitchell said.

“They were a little anxious about what was going on,” Mitchell said. “But they jumped right in, and they’re working out fine.

Some voters waited as long as 40 minutes in line to vote Tuesday morning. “The voters have been very, very, very patient,” she added.

First-time poll judges were paired with more experienced judges at a voting site in The Catholic High School of Baltimore at 2800 Edison Highway, said election judge Quintaria Brunson. The site saw long lines but was otherwise trouble-free, she said Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m not sure what’s happening in the rest of the world but, at least in this part of Baltimore, we’re doing really good,” she said.

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