Tennessee election officials have been training nursing home staff to help residents vote this year because COVID-19 has prevented election officials from taking ballots inside facilities, like they normally would.
Tennessee prohibits absentee voting by mail for most nursing home residents. So this year, local election commissions had to find a way to deputize nursing home staffers to become poll officials.
Roughly two dozen states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, use “mobile polling” for nursing homes, since getting out can be difficult for residents. Amid a pandemic, most nursing homes aren’t allowing visitors, either. So election officials have been turning to people who work inside facilities, and some, like Rutherford County, are even paying staffers to oversee voting.
“We hired them just like we would hire anyone else to be a poll worker,” says Alan Farley, Rutherford County elections administrator. “We recruited people who wanted to be a part of this process. That was the reason it went so well for us. They took great pride in making sure it was done right.”
Farley established a process that was adopted by several other counties. For each of the 17 nursing and rehabilitation facilities in Rutherford County, election officials created notebooks with plastic sleeves. Each sleeve contains all the documents for each registered voter in the facility.
The Rutherford County Election Commission also created videos to help explain the process. As part of the poll worker training, Farley says they role-played scenarios that can come up working with an elderly patient — especially going over what kind of help is allowed and what crosses the line.
They had considered wheeling in touch-screen voting machines. But after consulting with Murfreesboro-based nursing home chain NHC, the commission decided to avoid the problem of keeping the voting screen disinfected while it’s being used by dozens of residents.
But each county and each facility in Tennessee is taking a slightly different approach. Resha Oliphant, whose mother is in a Chattanooga nursing home, says the activities director helped her mother vote with two witnesses — presumably one Republican, one Democrat.
Bipartisan oversight
Some nursing homes have allowed election officials inside, with the required precautions. But under state rules, outside visitors are still not allowed at any facility that’s had a coronavirus case within the past 14 days.
Election officials have seen training nursing home staffers as the only way to allow some Tennessee residents to vote this year. But that has required getting facilities to reveal the political leanings of employees. Tennessee’s elections coordinator, Mark Goins, says some facilities were initially hesitant, until the reasoning was explained to them.
“You had to have bipartisan representation. That’s part of the checks and balances,” he says. “Fact is, that is the way we protect the integrity of the process.”
Goins says mobile voting seemed to work pretty well during the August election, and the process remains largely the same for the current election. The presidential polling must be complete in long-term care facilities five days before Election Day.
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