DuPage County trying to enlist more Republican election judges

With Election Day just two weeks away, the DuPage County clerk's office is putting out the call for more Republicans to serve as election judges.

Clerk Jean Kaczmarek says there's an "urgent need" for 160 additional Republican election judges to serve during the primary on March 17. Election judges staff polling places, set up voting machines and check voter registration logs.

"This is unusual," Kaczmarek said Monday. "Usually, we have more Republican election judges than Democratic election judges."

DuPage currently has 3,240 election judges - 2,009 Democrats and 1,231 Republicans - actively enrolled for the primary. But not all of them will be serving on Election Day.

As of Monday afternoon, 1,369 Democrats were scheduled to work as election judges. There were 1,093 Republicans scheduled to work.

Election judges from each party are required at the polling places. DuPage has 268 polling places covering 930 precincts.

Kaczmarek said county officials would prefer to have at least 10 election judges for each polling place on Election Day, "but we may only have seven or eight in some locations."

"Given our current number of actively enrolled Republican election judges," she said, "we won't have even coverage of both parties in the upcoming election."

Kaczmarek said officials have reached out multiple times to both the Republican and Democratic organizations to recruit new election judges over the past year. The clerk's office also has attempted to recruit from the general public.

"The shortage of Republican election judges is critical," she said. "It is extremely important to our office to have both Republican and Democratic voters equally represented on Election Day."

Election judges are paid $130 to work 13 hours on the day of the election.

Anyone interested in applying to be an election judge should visit www.dupageco.org/Election/JudgeApplication.