We offer and test an expanded explanation for poll worker recruitment that focuses on how efficiency gains associated with in-person early voting and Election Day vote centers, worker compensation, and flexibility in poll worker assignments reduces demand for poll workers. Our thesis is that affording in-person voters freedom to choose where and when to cast their ballots, before and on Election Day, produces significant efficiencies in the conduct of in-person voting such that fewer, not more, poll workers are required. We test our hypotheses with a national panel survey of local election officials on the difficulty of recruiting poll workers for all federal elections between 2008 and 2018 and find strong support for our hypotheses. Our findings point to in-person Election Day precinct voting as a significant source of the difficulty in obtaining persons to work the polls. We identify several antidotes for resolving the paucity of persons to work the polls. We further identify those remedies that are widely available and politically amenable to adoption.
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