The Georgia Youth Poll Workers Project is recruiting election day workers

ATLANTA — The Georgia Youth Poll Workers Project is recruiting election day workers.

During the primaries earlier this year, voters waited for hours to cast their ballots. A lot of the wait had to do with polling place problems and not enough poll workers.

With less than 100 days until the election, the creator of the Georgia Youth Poll Workers Project is hoping to make the voting process run smoother.

Evan Wayne Marlbrough, a recent Georgia State grad and voting rights activist, picked up the torch the late Rep. John Lewis passed. He started the project on July 1 with the vision to recruit 5,000 poll workers by November.

“It’s not just enough to fight for the rights that Congressman Lewis fought for when he was younger right, but to expand those,” Marlbrough said. “The election disaster wasn’t because of turn out; it was because of lack of resources to sustain that turn out”.

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Marlbrough is using Instagram to recruit, and anyone who signs up will earn between $3 and $400 on Election Day. He wants to get younger poll workers at each voting site. Hopefully Marlbrough’s work will fill a need as he tries to continue the legacy of John Lewis.

“Georgia State’s Atlanta campus is all in John Lewis’s district, so I was literally doing my work in the shadow of his office,” Marlbrough said. “If we don’t get poll workers resources we’re not just setting up them to fail we’re setting up our election to fail.”

So far, 500 young people have signed up to work the voting sites. Anyone interested in signing up or knows someone who is interested, should visit the Georgia Youth Poll Workers Project’s website.

Hundreds remained in lines at polling places late into Tuesday night Channel 2's Tom Jones spoke with voters in Union City who said they would not leave no matter how late it got.

Cox Media Group