In 2013, President Barack Obama ordered a review of election procedures after the 2012 presidential election was plagued with long lines. One of the “signal weaknesses” of the U.S. election system, a national commission found, was “the absence of a dependable, well-trained corps of poll workers.”
The primary causes of the problem, according to a 2014 report from New York-based think tank Demos, are a lack of uniform training before Election Day, disparate wages, and little recruitment among public employees and high school and college students.
The study found that only 30 states require that all poll workers receive training.
