Election 2006

Before dawn this morning, polling place coordinators across Manhattan began to prepare their sites for Election Day. There were voting machines to arrange and poll workers to organize. The work day would not end until 9:30 p.m. tonight, and they would not see their $300 paychecks for at least six weeks. It is a thankless job, but in many voting districts here, it is one people come back to again and again.

Donald R. Wilson, Sr., 69, arrived at the Bracetti Plaza housing development at East Fourth Street and Avenue C at 5 a.m. to help set up. It was not an easy task. Mr. Wilson has had many health problems over the years. Part of his right foot was recently amputated. Although he walks with a cane, he’s very good at telling other people what to do from a seated position.

“Listen, crew,” Mr. Wilson said loudly to a table full of poll workers nearby, “I love it when you get people in and out very quickly. Service them as fast as you can, with as much courtesy as you can.”

As he sat parked at a table sipping tea around 7 a.m., he kept a watchful eye over voters and poll workers. Mr. Wilson, who has been working the polls for the past 30 years, got involved in the voting process mainly out of a dissatisfaction with the P.T.A. back when his seven children were in school.

Despite his passion for leadership, Mr. Wilson said that this would be his last year as polling place coordinator. He and his wife of 47 years take care of three great-grandchildren, and due to his ongoing health problems, he said, “it is time to step aside and let the body rest some.”

Thirty years is a long time in politician years. Wilson worked the polls when Reagan defeated Carter, when Mario Cuomo became governor of New York, and the election night in 2000 that ended without a president-elect. Sitting across from people he has worked with for many years — many elderly, many retired — Wilson and others like him form the backbone of the American electoral body.

Even after he retires from his post, Mr. Wilson will stay involved in his community. He is on a mission, of sorts, to get “young people” to take over the leadership of his building, but has only found three interested parties so far. To Mr. Wilson, it is very important that “children and young adults get involved in life — they can’t take it for granted.”

On the other side of Manhattan, Arlene Cassarino, 55, wished younger people would show up to work at the polling site she coordinates. A self-described “born and bred Villager,” Ms. Cassarino has been working the polls for over thirty years. Outside Public School 3 at Hudson and Barrow Streets, Ms. Cassarino took a break from the busy voting site to talk about the changes he has witnessed.

“We don’t have the variety of people we used to have,” Ms. Cassarino lamented. She estimated that at one time, she knew 90 percent of the people who voted at P.S. 3. This year, she only seemed to know about one third of the faces that passed through the school auditorium doors. And the new faces are not necessarily younger, she explained, only wealthier.

A lot has changed administratively as well, according to Ms. Cassarino.

“When I first started,” she said, taking a puff of her hand-rolled cigarette, “there were no coordinators.” Now, the coordinators are expected to be troubleshooters and overseers, but Ms. Cassarino believed that the poll workers relied on the coordinators too much.

The poll workers, who are paid $200 for the day’s work, are trained to guide voters through the logistics of the voting process. Yet Ms. Cassarino noted that “most people do the job for financial reasons.” They do not seem to be too concerned with doing their jobs well.

Ms. Cassarino herself cited money as the primary reason she got involved on Election Day. She described her current occupations as “doing odd jobs” and “putting together a book of poetry” and thus relies on temporary posts like this one to supplement her income.

Yet a couple hundred dollars is not necessarily a reason for someone to return to the same position, year after year. Ms. Cassarino admitted that she considers the job a tradition, but more importantly, she believes in the voting process. “Even if it is an exercise, I think it’s an important exercise,” she said.

Not everyone shares her view. Despite a recent push by the U.S. Election Assistance Committee to involve college students in the electoral process, there was no one under thirty years old in sight, at either Bracetti Plaza or P.S. 3 this morning.

At other sites in the area, young poll workers were equally hard to find. Even at Washington Square Village, where many NYU professors and students live, and Hayden Hall, an NYU student dormitory, the poll workers appeared to be considerably older than the student population.

As the students floated in and out of the Hayden Hall cafeteria, they brushed right past the polling site. The dormitory residents appeared blissfully unaware that workers at least twice their age had been helping local residents through the electoral process since the wee hours of this morning.