people who might be willing<\/a> to spend Election Day checking in voters, manning machines and answering questions for 12 or more hours. Shanek Copes was there to sign up.<\/p>\n\u201cI know it\u2019s a very important job and it\u2019s a responsibility, a good responsibility, because it\u2019s important for people to vote,\u201d Copes said.<\/p>\n
It was also a thank you for long-time poll workers such as Gwendolyn Clay, who\u2019s been helping voters on Election Day for more than 60 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something that I love doing and I take it seriously. It started with my mother. My mother was a poll worker,\u201d she said, \u201cso it\u2019s always been in my blood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a former commissioner, came back for the festivities, and said election workers are worth celebrating.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most important people on Election Day are not the secretary of state or even the commissioners,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s your neighbors who show up to the polling place to work all day making sure democracy works the way that it should.\u201d<\/p>\n
Commissioner Seth Bluestein says the city had a good recruitment year. Officials set out to recruit 250 new poll workers for the semiquincentennial and has signed up more than 500 already. Almost 100 new poll workers signed up at the festival. <\/p>\n
\u201cEvents like today\u2019s help us recruit new poll workers and we\u2019re going to continue doing that work all the way through Nov. 3to make sure the polls are fully-staffed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 The courtyard at Philadelphia City Hall turned into a party on Tuesday as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[16249,902,69,5550,71,70,111391],"class_list":["post-263636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-election-workers","tag-elections","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-city-hall","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philadelphia-city-commissioners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}