Respect the job election judges do

I have been an election judge for nearly 40 years and am currently working early voting in Lake County.

We judges have been told over and over in trainings that candidate materials of any kind (buttons, hats, shirts, pamphlets, etc.) are not allowed inside a polling place.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, a woman walked into the polling place wearing a Trump 2020 mask, only his name was in Hebrew. I spotted it right away, since I read Hebrew. I told her she could not wear it inside and asked her to take it off. She refused, so I told two other judges, one man and one woman, what the mask said. Both told her she had to remove it. Instead, she took out a plain black mask and covered the other one with it. She must have thought she was being clever.

Please voters, our jobs as election judges are difficult enough. Some of us are now working 11-hour days with all the COVID measures in place. Please make things easier for us, not harder.

Elaine Lampert

Buffalo Grove