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The wheelchair-bound Dede Dewey has been a precinct worker for the past 16 years. The Berkeley resident with short gray hair and eyeglasses, said she was the first disabled person in Alameda County to become a precinct worker. 

“I had to fight for the privilege of not only voting but working as a polling officer,” Dewey said.  

During the March 5 election, she was assigned to the polling station at the La Pena Cultural Center, which covers a South Berkeley block bound by Woolsey Street and Shattuck, Ashby and Deakin avenues. 

The area is predominantly lower-middle class and Democratic, said Robert Mann, another precinct worker there. 

It was a slow day. About 60 voters had turned out by 10:30 a.m., 20 to 30 percent of whom were African-American and the rest were white, Mann said. Roughly 50 percent were male and the other half female, he estimated. 

As a middle-aged man came in, Mann asked his name and got his signature on a blue roster. He asked the voter what kind of ballot he wanted.  

A Democratic one, the man said.  

Dewey’s job was tearing out ballot sheets for the voters. To ascertain the voter’s choice before handing him the ballot sheet, she offered, “Or Republican?” 

He stuck with his original choice. And the soft-spoken Dewey pleasantly said, “We just make it clear that you have a choice.” 

Mann said non-election years tend to be slow. During an election year, he said he would see a couple of hundred voters turn out at a polling station. For the 2000 primary election, the voter turnout in Berkeley was 46.6 percent, according to the Registrar of Voters. 

Even with the low turnout, Dewey said she feels she is participating in the political process and helping get people’s opinions heard, she said. 

As Dewey took a break, she reminisced about her years as a poll worker. For the more than a 12-hour shift, Dewey said she’d get paid $80. But there’s another motivation behind working precincts. 

“This is one form of community service,” she said. “That’s why I do it.”  

Dewey said when she first started working, at the stations she encountered difficulties as a voter. She said the polling stations just weren’t accessible. The doors weren’t wide enough for wheelchairs to pass through or the booths weren’t designed for disabled persons.  

And as a volunteer, “it was hard, when a disabled person came to vote, to convince my co-workers to let the disabled person vote,” Dewey said. 

“They would try to make the disabled person go to another precinct to vote. And that’s not right,” she said. “It happens much less today but it still happens.” 

The American Disabilities Act of 1990 requires all polling stations to be handicapped-accessible. That has greatly improved the situation, but it is still bad, Dewey said. She remembered a television campaign ad for Secretary of State candidate Michela Alioto. The ad mentions that there are about 1,000 polling stations in the state that aren’t handicapped-accessible. 

Dewey said she is also excited about another law on the books that will require precincts with 90-percent bilingual populations to have a bilingual interpreter.  

She remembers the struggles of communicating with a Spanish-speaking population when she worked at an Oakland precinct 10 years ago. 

“It was extremely difficult,” she said. “I could show them how to punch the ballot,” but other than that, she couldn’t help them. Dewey said those Hispanic voters were not as informed about their candidate choices as they should have been, because of the language barrier. 

Being a minority has made Dewey sensitive to other minorities’ needs. “I’m not required to speak Spanish , why should they be required to speak English? To me, that’s a form of discrimination,” she said. 

As a precinct worker, Dewey also stays abreast of the new laws or amendments in the voting procedures, such as voter registration deadline. It used to be that voters were required to register a month before the election. Now, it’s changed to two weeks, she said. 

“By being a precinct worker, I became a larger part of changing the system.”