Four years into her tenure as Hopkinton’s town moderator, Sara Persechino has overseen the 2020 presidential election, conducted an election through COVID-19 and managed the 2024 primary, where many Granite Staters took to write-in ballots when President Joe Biden didn’t campaign or get himself on the ballot for reelection in New Hampshire.

Those circumstances – the write-ins, especially – meant bolstering her roster of volunteers. Though she said she inherited a robust group of volunteers from the previous moderator, the extra help stuck around, and Persechino said Hopkinton has no shortage of people willing to work the polls this year.

“The list has grown over the last four years that I’ve been doing this work, I think pretty organically,” Persechino said. “Some people are available for some elections and not others, so it’s good to have a big pool.”

This bucks the national trend of a poll worker shortage. More than 775,000 people staffed the polls in the 2020 election, but the U.S. needs that number to be closer to one million. New Hampshire officials, however, say the state is on track to properly staff its polling locations.

Town moderators and clerks from municipalities around Concord say their recruitment is on par with previous years, and with what they need. Persechino said in addition to town officials – including herself, the assistant moderator, town clerk, five select board members and three supervisors of the checklist – Hopkinton has 17 ballot clerks and greeters and eight ballot counters scheduled to work this fall’s elections. The town has a population of around 6,000 people.

For write-in campaigns especially, Hopkinton makes sure it has enough ballot counters. “It just takes a longer time,” Persechino said. “Now we have a surplus of community members who have experience counting ballots, which is really great to pull from.”

Political parties also appoint inspectors of the election, who observe the process on their behalf. For example, the Democratic Party enlisted four inspectors in Hopkinton and 10 in Bow, officials said. The GOP appointed one in Hopkinton and three in Bow.

Mridula Naik, the Bow town clerk, said her locality has 55 volunteers on its list to recruit for this year, not including those appointed by the political parties. That’s well above Bow’s need for 41 poll workers, she said. In her 13 years working local elections, Naik said Bow has “never had a shortage,” and the surplus often means volunteers are upset that the town can’t use their help.

Jim Goff, the town clerk for Pembroke, said he keeps a list of people to volunteer as ballot clerks or in other roles. Twenty-one have previously worked the polls, he said, and there are six new sign-ups that have yet to receive training. For its busiest elections, Pembroke uses about 10 ballot clerks at a time at check-in – some work half the day, and some the whole day, Goff said.

In Loudon, Ashley Simonds said her office has 20-30 poll workers, including ballot counters and other team members but not the mandated roles such as the moderator or supervisors of the checklist. This is on par with the usual 20 workers required to run elections, and Loudon is using e-poll books – electronic lists for voter check-ins, instead of the printed sheet of names – for the first time this year. Simonds is unsure yet whether the town will need more or less volunteers to accommodate that.

Secretary of State David Scanlan didn’t have the numbers on whether New Hampshire as a whole is on track to staff its polling stations because elections are largely run by local officers, he said. In the big picture, he estimated there are about 3,000 local election officials who are elected to serve as moderators, supervisors of the checklist and in other roles. The state needs double that amount to actually run the operation.

Scanlan’s office runs multiple recruitment initiatives and is tapping service organizations, the senior population and veterans to help out. New Hampshire works with an organization called Vet the Vote and encourages veterans to staff polling places as another way to serve their country. Plus, he said, veterans are well-respected in their communities and can be “a great example” for civic duty.

Overall, he said most communities don’t have any issues getting the staff they need to pull off the elections.

“Occasionally, there are pockets or individual towns that have trouble finding poll workers,” Scanlan said. “When that happens, there’s an extra effort that’s applied to that particular area to make sure that they have the help and the manpower they need to conduct an election.”

Scanlan attributed the national shortage of poll workers to increased hypervigilance and tension surrounding elections, especially since the 2020 presidential race.

“There is a lot of scrutiny on individuals that are responsible for conducting elections,” Scanlan said. “That’s added stress and added pressure, and there are many people that just don’t want to be in a situation like that, so they decline to work the polls the next time around.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, or send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.