Shasta introduced ‘poll closers’ for the June 2 election. How did it go?

At the Redding Christian Fellowship church shortly after 8 p.m. on June 2, about a dozen people were hurriedly scrambling to close up the polling place and prepare ballots to be brought to the elections office. 

It was Election Day, and the church had just closed its doors after a long day of welcoming voters. Jean Young Werbil, one of the precinct inspectors at the church — which hosted two different voting precincts in one central space — flipped through her inspector’s manual to make sure she and her team of poll workers were closing the polling place properly. 

She asked a nearby poll worker where her “poll closers” were, to which he responded that they were helping clean up the room next door. She asked him to retrieve them. 

“They need to do their job,” she said in a stern manner. 

When the two poll closers approached Werbil, they at first expressed some confusion and hesitancy about what they were supposed to do, with one of them saying they were only given a broad overview during a two-hour class about their role. Werbil looked through her handbook, and together, they all got started on next steps. 

Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis — who’s likely to lose his bid for re-election, according to current vote totals — implemented the new process of poll closers just a couple weeks before the primary election. Prior to this election, once the polls closed at 8 p.m., poll workers would conduct a simple count of the various types of ballots submitted at the polling place, then precinct inspectors would take ballots to the elections office. 

The poll closers’ jobs were to sort through ballots that were voted in person at each precinct to ensure that any that were damaged or had extraneous markings were separated out for different processing, something that used to be done only after ballots had reached the elections office. 

The process was intended to be more efficient. But a number of those working the polls said the new process was chaotic and confusing. At some precinct locations, ballots didn’t leave the polling places until two hours after polls initially closed, potentially delaying voting results. 

Amy Andrews was assigned as a poll rover — someone who provides support to and oversees multiple precincts. She said she was part of a group chat with other rovers used to communicate during Election Day. After the polls closed, she said, several rovers messaged the group chat and said the closers at their locations didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

“I think the overall consensus was that it was a little scattered, and it was not as helpful as it could have been,” she added. 

What were the poll closers supposed to do?

The poll closer process isn’t the first change Curtis has made to elections in Shasta. During the November 2025 special election, he started livestreaming ballots before and after machine processing in an effort to increase transparency. Before ballots can be shown on the livestream, they must be reviewed to look for extraneous and possibly identifying markings to ensure they’re removed before being shown on screen. 

The need for this review process is largely what prompted Curtis’ implementation of poll closers. At each precinct, poll closers were instructed to sort precinct ballots — only those cast in person — into “good” and “bad” ballots, as Curtis described them during training, with “bad” ballots being ones that have extraneous markings on them or can’t go through the machine because they are damaged or unreadable. Those ballots, Curtis said, required further assessment by staff and may have needed to be duplicated in order to be properly read by machines. 

The “bad” ballots were supposed to be placed in a bag marked with an “X” by poll closers. The ballots without extraneous markings or damage were to be sorted into groups of 50, then placed into sealed bags and marked with their precinct number. 

The new role, classified as extra help, was also a paid position. Curtis said starting pay for the closers was about $17 an hour, contrasting from the flat rate of around $100 given to poll workers and $125 to precinct inspectors, who often work more than 15 hours on Election Day. Curtis added that the poll closers’ hours depended on how busy polling places were and whether they needed to fill in for poll workers who didn’t show up on Election Day.

Each precinct location — there’s more than 50 in Shasta County — was intended to have two poll closers.

How did the poll closer process play out? 

While poll closers’ primary jobs only started once the polls closed, some of them reportedly arrived hours before the 8 p.m. closing time. Andrews, the poll rover, said some closers showed up as early as 4 p.m., but since the role they were responsible for didn’t start until hours later, they sat idly until then. 

Andrew Jacobsen, an experienced poll worker who was at Saint James Lutheran Church for the election last week, said this was one of the aspects about poll closers that frustrated him most. He said the closers at his precinct showed up more than two hours before the polls closed and often got in the way of voters by standing in front of ballot boxes and chatting with poll workers. 

“There was nothing for them to do until the very end,” he said. “Basically we had to just give them stuff to pacify them until it was time for them to actually work. That was very disruptive.” 

Jacobsen said the poll closers didn’t come in with any sort of manual or instructions, and they sometimes argued with the precinct inspector about their responsibilities. 

“They didn’t seem to really understand their exact role and what they were supposed to be doing,” he said. 

Andrews agreed. She said she had to explain the poll closer process to some of the closers she oversaw, which she said got confusing because there were contradictions in how everyone involved was instructed. 

“If it had been made clear to all the poll workers and rovers and everyone exactly what the closers were going to do, that would have been better, because there was no consistency in what we were told they were doing,” she said. 

During the poll closer process, she described the scene as chaotic, with the involvement of extra people making the closing process more complex. “There’s more questions coming from every direction,” she said. 

She explained that it might’ve been better for the elections office to limit the poll closers to just cleaning up the polling place and leave ballot sorting to staffers at the elections office. 

“It’s always helpful to have people to help pick things up,” she said, “but I don’t know that that’s worth money that’s paid out and the chaos of it.” 

Donna Hunter, a precinct inspector at a different location, said her polling place finished closing the latest she had ever experienced.

“I was relieved when I was dropping off our ballots at the clerk’s office to see the line, which meant we were not the only ones” running late, she said, referring to the line of cars waiting to drop off ballots outside the Market Street elections office. 

Not everyone struggled with the poll closer process. Werbil, the precinct inspector at the Redding Christian Fellowship church, said the process made sense to her — as long as she went step-by-step with her manual. 

“It’s just a matter of opening up your book and following the directions,” she said. 

Werbil noted that this was her first time as a precinct inspector, and she had only been a poll worker once before, so she didn’t have a point of comparison when considering the potentially added time of the poll closer process. She said she overall felt that the closers were very helpful.

Shasta Assistant ROV Brent Turner acknowledged after the election that “the whole poll worker thing is a tremendous work in progress,” adding that poll closers were part of an effort by Curtis to reinvent poll worker training, operations and manuals simultaneously as a way to “tackle everything at once.” He said the goal of poll closers was to expedite the election night process in a way that would increase efficiency. 

“I think that was the attempt,” he said. “Now, when you get out in the field, how it plays out when you have different personalities at every poll [and] different skillsets, some of them might retain better than others.”

Regardless, Turner said, he thinks the timing of voting results coming in on election night was around the same as the November 2025 election. 

“Even if it did take a little bit longer, in my mind, if it creates efficiency and or security, then it’s worth another 15 minutes in the chain,” he said. “But that’s to be analyzed.” 

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