Election-Campaign Law

California Bureau of State Audits report on county registrar?s pollworker training

By Michael Alvarez

The California Bureau of State Audits released a report on county registrar pollworker training programs in California. Here are the report highlights:

- In 2006 the Office of the Secretary of State (office) adopted poll worker training guidelines (training guidelines), as required by law.

- The law does not require the training guidelines to be updated and the office has not done so since issuing the training guidelines in 2006.

- The office’s senior management asserts that although the law does not direct the office to monitor counties’ compliance with the training guidelines, the office does conduct some observations of counties’ elections and shares the results of its findings with the counties it observes.

- The eight counties we reviewed substantially complied with the content of the training guidelines when training their inspectors, but some counties appeared to only partially train poll workers in certain areas.

- Some counties employed noteworthy practices targeted toward providing poll workers with added opportunities to practice what they have learned.

- Not all counties required inspectors to attend training or were able to demonstrate they trained all inspectors prior to the February 2008 election.

- None of the counties could clearly demonstrate how the information collected from the February 2008 election was summarized and used to update their training for the June 2008 election.

- None of the counties could clearly demonstrate how the information collected from the February 2008 election was summarized and used to update their training for the June 2008 election.

- Many of the counties were not able to provide reliable data that described how they resolved voter and poll worker complaints.

Here’s a link to the full report, “County Poll Workers: The Office of the Secretary of State Has Developed Statewide Guidelines, but County Training Programs Need Some Improvement.”

Full post as published by Election Updates on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).