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It hasn’t been easy in recent years to find seasonal workers willing to manage Marion County’s elections at a rate of $11 an hour, nor to fill positions for a 14-hour Election Day at $100 per day. Indianapolis officials hope a proposed pay increase to be introduced Monday at the City-County Council meeting will make a difference.
Councilor Michael-Paul Hart is a township chair for the Republican Party and is familiar with the task of searching for poll workers. In his eight years in the role, he said, it’s become harder and harder to fill the 70 partisan positions.
His proposal before the council would raise the pay for absentee voter board workers to $15 an hour. The proposal only recommends an increase in the per diem for clerks and inspectors who work the polls on Election Day because those rates are set by the mayor.
Clerks greet voters, check voter IDs, operate the electronic poll books, issue challenges, assist voters with disabilities, and aid with the accounting of ballots. Inspectors lead vote centers and attend mandatory training beforehand.
If passed, the proposal would signal the council’s support for the mayor to raise clerk per diem from $100 to $180 and inspectors from $200 to $240.
Democratic Councilor Brienne Delaney, the former director of dlections for the Marion County Election Board, has cosponsored the proposal. Additionally, Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell has endorsed it.
“This proposal is quite welcome and long overdue,” Bell told IBJ. “If it had not been proposed—you know, brought to me—I would have gone to the council to request it, but it’s probably going to have a higher likelihood of passage because it was their idea.”
The absentee voter board workers are bipartisan pairs appointed by the Democratic and Republican parties. Bell said the county manages to staff all 186 vote centers, but there are typically a need for more bipartisan teams to open and run ballots through the ballot-reading machines.
Bell, who formerly chaired the Marion County Democratic Party, applauded the bipartisan work to increase election worker wages.
“When you set aside the partisan nature of it to accomplish something like this, it makes things a lot easier,” Bell told IBJ.
The council will introduce the proposal Monday. The full City-County Council could vote on it as soon as its Oct. 7 meeting.
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