Stephen Richer

So one, every county differs in terms of how many observers it allows.

But in terms of people who actually work the process, we in Maricopa County, we welcomed all types.

If you were somebody who didn't believe in the validity of elections, that's fine.

We still took you in, but we didn't just take you and your five buddies

and just send you off to one voting location.

We take you in, we train you, we talk with you, and then we integrate you into other teams, teams of people from different backgrounds, teams from people of different politics, teams from people who have been doing this different lengths of time.

And there is a little bit of that sort of almost watchfulness

over each other and I think one of the really beautiful things about election administration is that in almost all instances the people who come in and are part of this process develop a camaraderie with the people that they work with and they develop a sense of pride in the results and they develop a sense of defensiveness in that they were part of this process and so I say to anyone who is

still questioning how these things work, either go and get a tour of your elections facility, or better yet, figure out how you can be an observer for your political party, or figure out how you can participate in at least one part of the election process.

Yeah.

And, you know, just there's some great social science studies about people who are serve on a jury walk away with a better perception of the criminal justice system.

And while there haven't this hasn't been as studied in the election worker context.

From my anecdotal experience, I firmly believe that is true.

And it is something that is constructive.

And it's something that will actually teach you rather than just retweeting or resharing the Rumble video or the true social posts or the Twitter posts.

So for the 2024 presidential election, we had about 2.6 million registered voters in Maricopa County.

And we had over 3,000 temporary workers helping with that process.

That's everything from the people who are working at a voting location to people who are driving box trucks, to people who are working in our warehouse, to people doing signature verification, to people who are actually taking the ballots out of their return mail envelopes in bipartisan teams and smoothing them out and making sure there aren't rips or gum on the ballots before we put them into the tabulators.

And so really it's,

it's a very time intensive process.