Group says poll workers not adequately trained

An election watchdog group is calling on the Maricopa County Elections Department to clean up its act before the upcoming elections.

The Arizona Advocacy Network says it doesn't want a repeat of election day 2006.

"We found large, large numbers of people in several polling places, where there would be dozens per hour of people coming to the wrong polling place," says Linda Brown with AAN.

She says county elections is doing a poor job of telling people where they need to go to vote.

She claims that when confronted with the concerns, election officials respond by telling the group "We send two mailers to each voter telling them where to go. If they don't read their mail, that's their problem."

Brown also says workers at your polling won't know what they're doing. The AAN claims the workers get one to three hours of training and Brown says that's not enough.

"They cannot possibly learn all of that material including how to troubleshoot machines when they break down and that sort of thing and understand what ID is acceptable whether it be a photo ID or a non photo ID."

But Tammy Patrick of the county elections department contends that polling place workers are adequately trained. "For the primary election, we have a little more than 100 training classes that our 7,000 plus poll workers have the opportunity to attend. We also have almost a dozen bilingual board worker training classes where we go over the law of why we provide language assistance and how to do so effetively and in an impartial manner."

In addition, Patrick says several workers have completed "premium worker training." Workers attending those classes are required to pass a certification test. They are certified for three years after passing the test. Only people who have experience working at a polling place are allowed to take part in the premium training.

For more information on how you can find out where to vote, go to www.recorder.maricopa.gov.

You can also call the voter information line at 602-506-1511.