Professors to Assist at Maryland Polls

Academe, Mar/Apr 2006 by Bradley, Gwendolyn

Faculty, staff, and students from Maryland colleges and universities will serve as election judges at local polling places this year as part of a project jointly sponsored by the AAUP and the Center for the Study of Democracy at St. Mary's College of Maryland. The project, Maryland Professors at the Polls, was initiated after the AAUP hosted a group of twenty-five faculty members and election officials to plan a joint response to the extreme shortage of election judges faced by many Maryland counties in the last election. The group noted that the Election Assistance Commission reported that in the 2004 presidential election polling stations across the country had almost 500,000 too few poll workers, and the average age of poll workers was seventy-two.

The Maryland project is the first phase of a nationwide project that the AAUP plans for the 2008 elections. Maryland Professors at the Polls is supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

"The Professors at the Polls project challenges all of America's faculty to recognize that faculty are ideally positioned to assist the democratic process by serving as poll workers," says AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen. "The initiative builds on a long-standing commitment of faculty to service and civic engagement and provides a direct solution to one of the most serious impediments to the successful working of American democracy."

-G.B.