Kentucky Secretary of State partners with local business to help recruit poll workers

LEXINGTON, Ky. ( FOX 56 ) — Election day is fast approaching, and leading up to the big day, Secretary of State Michael Adams (R) is using a unique approach to recruit poll workers.

It takes 15,000 volunteers to conduct a statewide election and Adams is renewing his partnership with the Kentucky Guild of Brewers, the Kentucky Wineries Association, and this year the Kentucky Restaurant Association to make sure Kentucky has the help it needs on election day.

Two restaurants, 3 wineries, and 6 breweries are participating in this year’s recruitment efforts.Those 11 locations are spread out all across the state, from Lexington to Bowling Green.

Every location will have hang tags and table tents asking for volunteers to work the polls in November. These tags contain QR codes that direct people straight to the application process.

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Adams said conducting elections is a team sport and with 40 days to go before the big day, he hopes this partnership will inspire Kentuckians to get involved.

“Our elections are run on the ground by volunteers. Obviously, we’ve got a Secretary of State; we have county clerks, but we’re really a pretty small proportion of the army that it takes to run an election in Kentucky,” said Adams. “The people that work, the polls that you go vote at—those are your neighbors, those are fellow citizens; they’re not the government and so we have to have volunteers to put on these elections.”

Adams said this approach has consistently worked since he’s taken office in 2019. In fact, he believes this partnership helped save the 2020 election, a year when the younger generation had to step up and replace some of the older volunteers who were forced to stay home during the pandemic.

Four years later, he hopes it will continue to drive a younger audience to public service.

“When I was elected in 2019, I told the legislature before I was even sworn in, let alone before COVID, that we had a crisis brewing in not having enough volunteers and this is not an election issue, per se; it’s reflective of a larger decline in society, just less volunteering. So, we especially have to find newer generations. If you go vote, you’ll notice most of the poll workers are senior citizens, and God bless them for volunteering over and over again, but as time continues, they’re going to age out. We have to have younger people,” Adams said.

Now there are some requirements to becoming a poll worker. You must be eligible to vote in their county, must be able to attend training, and must be able to work all day on election day. To register to become a poll worker click here .

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