One of LA County's first Latina poll workers reflects on decades of service

Lucia Perez stood in front of Grape Street Elementary School in Watts and remembered how isolating democracy felt to her more than 52 years ago.

She had just become eligible to vote and her father had marched her down to the Los Angeles County Registrar to get her registered. But Perez didn’t just want to vote. She decided she wanted to help others vote, too. So she volunteered to work as a poll worker.

Election night was chilly. And not because of the weather.

“You could feel it. Words don’t have to be spoken to get the vibe they didn’t want you around,” Perez said. “But I knew they didn’t like me because I was Mexican.”

Perez, 71, of Cudahy is one of the county’s first Latina poll workers, and a lot has changed since that night Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. Aside from a spotty lost decade in the ’70s due to a troubled marriage, Perez has seen thousands and thousands of voters cast ballots, seen them counted by hand and by machine and in one language to now nine languages.

She will be working the polls on June 7, when Califoians will vote in a primary that has drawn national interest with Ted Cruz and John Kasich hoping the Golden State will stop Donald Trump’s march to 1,279 delegates and the Republican nomination. And she said she expects it to be busy on the Democratic side of the ticket now that Beie Sanders has said he will focus on wiing Califoia despite Hillary Clinton’s large delegate lead.

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“I’d say it will be similar to 2008,” Perez said. “That was one of the busier primary elections I’d ever seen because there was so much excitement for Barack Obama.”

Perez said her father placed such an emphasis on voting that it was a rite of passage with her and five siblings to get registered to vote.

But she was the only one who wanted to work in the election process.

“I did it because it was embedded in me by my father to participate by voting, but I wanted to do more,” Perez said. “It was about getting my hands wet and doing something for the country.”

In looking back at the elections she’s worked, she said she doesn’t miss the old voting booths made of wood (“You’d always get splinters putting them together”) and the hand-counting back in ’64 of ballots had them working well into the moing.

She said when she worked as an inspector, she began a ritual of getting up at 4u2009a.m. to make burritos, cookies and coffee for her workers. She said as she’s gotten older, however, the physicality of the job that requires lifting equipment forced her to go back to being a poll clerk. Perez doesn’t do it for the money, though she’ll make $175 compared with the $15 she made for that first election.

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Dean Logan, the county registrar, said Perez and workers like her are critical to democracy.

“Ideally what we want in our poll workers is a representative sample of the electorate we serve,” Logan said. “Dedicated individuals who recognize that our representative form of goveing depends on participation and belongs to the people.”

There will be about 4,800 polling stations set up for the primary for 4.9 million voters — though in 2012, the primary in Los Angeles County only drew 21.8 percent of the registered voter pool. The county is expecting a surge in tuout this year.

Perez said she’s seen primary years where there might only be a handful of people waiting to vote when she’d open up the polling station. She said 2004 stood out as a slow primary similar to 2012.

“It was really quiet,” she said. “You know it’s going to be slow when you don’t see anyone lining up early in the moing.”

She’s not one to make predictions for the primary tuout or the general election. Perez has seen the ebb and flow of most years, some so slow she’s been able to crochet during a shift, and she’s pretty sure tuout rates won’t compete with 1964.

That year, there were 3u2009million eligible voters and tuout was 86 percent. If that happened this time around, there’d not only be no knitting, but probably no real breaks either.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “That would be great, but it would be busier than anything I’d ever seen.”