MUSKEGON, Michigan — Less than three weeks removed from the August 2 Primary Election, nearly 60 Muskegon county residents earned their certification as election inspectors Thursday afternoon.
Two training sessions were held on the lakeshore, and after three hours, each attendee is more that halfway to being ready to work a polling place.
"They will be able to take it anywhere in the state of Michigan to any city or township clerk who’s looking for election inspectors between now and the next two years," said Muskegon County Clerk Nancy Waters. "The local city and township clerks will be training them in a couple of weeks before they actually go into the precinct to work."
The trainings lasted 3 hours, covering 97 slides worth of material, and including a mock election to get a handle on how the voting machines work. The election days themselves are long, and begin way before the first voter arrives. As part of the process, election inspectors must announce - out loud - 'the polls are open' at 7a.m.
The voting machines themselves were also tested and used as practice for different situations an inspector might face. The mock ballot of the day included questions like what is your favorite car brand, and who is the best singer, but worked as templates to show off common errors like underfilling (not enough votes cast for a ballot item or items), overfilling (casting too many votes for a given election) or leaving a section blank entirely.
One thing that was not discussed were safety procedures. Waters says that will be left up to the local clerks to lay out safety protocols for each specific polling place.
"We do have an open carry in the state of Michigan, and we advise them that they may see an open carry come in, that there’s no need to be alarmed but if they start doing anything that looks unusual they should contact the local clerk," Waters said. "We've never had any problems, we don’t anticipate any problems and we’re hopeful that this will be a secure election for the inspectors as well as the voters."
Once an inspector is selected to work at an election polling place, they will be placed into groups of three. In those groups, they are required to have offsetting political affiliations - two democrats and a republican or vice versa.
"We want to make sure that it is non partisan so there’s no possibility that someone can say they were influenced by one party or the other," said Lori Hayes, Muskegon County's Election Coordinator.
Going through the training does not mean someone is guaranteed to be hired as an election inspector.
The training and ensuing certification is good for two years, and applies to any municipality in the state of Michigan.
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