As Lauderdale County voters prepare to head to the polls to vote in the primary election on Aug. 8, local election officials are working hard to make sure poll workers in each voting precinct are prepared for whatever may come. Lauderdale County election commissioners were hard at work this past week training the small army of poll workers it takes to man each precinct on Election Day.

Preparing to welcome a new class of poll workers to training Thursday morning at Mt. Barton, Election Commission Chairperson Gloria Dancy said poll workers are the frontline workers of local elections.

“When you come to the poll, you have experienced poll workers that know what to do,” she said. “They know how to handle every situation at the poll.”

There is a steep learning curve for poll workers, Dancy said, as they must learn how to open the polls in the morning, handle issues such as voting by affidavit ballot or challenged ballots — which Lauderdale County has not yet seen — and how to close the polls and securely transport the precincts data to the circuit clerk’s office for counting.

“They are our frontline workers,” she said. “We check on them all day, we teach them what ballot to give them, everything. They learn everything today.”

For this year’s training, Dancy said the election commissioners were trying something a little different. Workers were split into six groups, which rotated between stations taught by each of the five election commissioners and Circuit Clerk Donna Jill Johnson. The small group size and specialized topic at each station gave workers more opportunity to ask questions and clarify things they didn’t understand.

“They’re getting individual instruction on how to do everything from the beginning of the day to the end of the day,” she said.

Nationwide, poll workers have been difficult to find as the integrity of elections has become intertwined with partisan politics. The state Legislature recently passed bills allowing for increased pay for poll workers to help counties recruit the numbers needed to run elections.

Recruiting poll workers in Lauderdale County was difficult, Dancy said, but the commission got it done. In preparation for the primary, she said the election commission hired about 296 workers to man the polls.

With poll worker training behind them, the commission will next turn to Logic and Accuracy testing, which tests the ballot scanning machines voters will feed their ballots into on Election Day to make sure they are working properly.