Last Tuesday, I spent the day working the polls for the New Jersey primary elections. After about a week of handing out hundreds of “I Voted” stickers to high schoolers who definitely did not vote, I thought about the day once again and realized that not a lot of people voted.
Now, this wasn’t a surprise. Census Bureau reported that during the 2024 election, “73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted,” and of course the presidential election would have a higher proportion of voter turnout than the primary elections, but the amount that showed up was still surprising.
A 30 minute training course a month prior was probably enough to tell me how to do everything but definitely not enough to prepare me for the reality of waking up at 4:30 in the morning, but it is what it is I suppose. Of course, the polls opened at 6 AM, so we had to have everything ready by that point, but we were going to be there until 8 PM. Even then, I was warned that there was the possibility of people being in line outside the polling place, and we would have to let every single person in that line prior to 8 PM vote, so we could stay for a long time.
And then we had seventy seven people vote the whole day. Yeah, around 5 per hour. That was pretty exciting.
I think what sums the experience up for me was just seeing that out of everyone that voted in the primaries, at least from my section, 95% of them were senior citizens or family who came in with senior citizens, and some people weren’t even aware of how the primary worked before trying to vote. I don’t know if it’s just the area I was assigned, but people from other stations seemed to report the same kind of turnout, with the highs not even reaching the triple digits and lows in the teens.
When I go to work the main gubernatorial election this November, I hope to see a bit better turnout from the community. I enjoyed the experience very much, but it was a bit disheartening to see such few people participate, even if it was a primary. I met some cool people who helped me through the process, had some extremely stale pretzels in the morning, and got to talk with people from around the community while helping them get situated to cast their ballot. It was definitely a fun experience, being a student poll worker, and I look forward to doing it again later this year.
And if you’re reading this, vote! Remember to cast your ballot because your voice matters.