2022 - Winner for Best Practices in Recruiting, Retaining, and Training Poll Workers

The right to VOTE is a privilege, which belongs to ALL eligible citizens, regardless of ability or disability. Knowing that, the Martin County Supervisor of Elections office continually stives to provide creative and innovative ways to engage poll workers during training. After several staff brainstorming sessions, it was decided to contact one of our community partners to assist with teaching the required Sensitivity Training. The Elections Office immediately contacted Helping People Succeed (HPS)' a local non-profit agency for individuals with disabilities. Immediately, Suzy Hutchinson, CEO responded that she and HPS client, Tricia Overton, a woman with an intellectual disability, would love to participate in the training. The poll workers enjoyed having a'local" voter with disabilities who activity participates in voting share her personal experience and techniques on addressing/treating individuals with disabilities when voting in-person. The recorded session was not only used as a tool to educate and train poll workers, but Helping People Succeed placed the training video on their website for clients to view. Due to the overwhelming success of this collaboration through feedback from workers and HPS, the training video was shared with Alan Abramowitz-CEO of ARC Florida, Healthy Families, and other non-profits training tool.