ELECTION COMMISSION LEANS ON NURSING HOME EMPLOYEES TO HELP RESIDENTS VOTE

BY HANNAH HERNER

In a typical election, a team of 16 paid poll workers would fan out to nursing homes around Davidson County, meeting with residents to help them fill out their ballots.

This year, the responsibility of making sure nursing home residents aren’t disenfranchised fell onto the staff of those facilities, especially because Tennessee would not allow mail-in ballots for this population.

Davidson County Election Commission dropped off ballots to each nursing home in the county this year, and picked them back up.

“Instead of our staff going into the facility — which is still prohibited in a lot of facilities — we were dependent on the nursing homes to actually help us and help the voters with the process,” says Jeff Roberts, administrator for the Davidson County Election Commission.

Roberts reported that out of around 710 ballots dropped off, 656 ballots were turned in between Oct. 4 and Oct. 13. Those missing either died, moved from the facility, were in the hospital or declined to vote.

This deadline is unique to Davidson County, as the goal was to get the nursing homes taken

care of before early voting started in the county on Oct. 14, Roberts says. Voting in nursing homes can legally start at 29 days out from the election.

The same protocol was followed for the local election back in August. In some counties in the state, the employees were paid just like a poll worker would be, but in Davidson County they were not.

For the first time, LeadingAge, a national training and advocacy organization for senior care providers, created a Voting Plan Toolkit to help nursing homes across the country make sure their residents will be able to vote, and also to fight misinformation amongst elderly voters.

“I don’t care if you’re red or blue — there’s a lot of noise out there that can try to confuse the process,” says Gwyn Earl, executive director of LeadingAge TN. “We don’t have a lot of extra time to deal with the noise. We have to trust the process and make sure we’re crossing every t and dotting every i and giving our residents the means and the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.”

Lindsey Vanderkooi, first year activities

director at The Meadows Senior Community in Bellevue had a list she was referencing on the days leading up to the ballot pickup. She had to make sure her residents were, in fact, registered to vote, and make sure they also had the appropriate cognitive score to do so. When working on a ballot with a resident, she signed as a witness and signed off to say whether she assisted them. She was in constant communication with the election commission throughout this process, she said.

Before this election, she helped residents get registered to vote. Throughout the last seven months, she’s arranged video calls with families of residents and strove to keep residents entertained and active while not allowing them to congregate — all without any volunteers or outside help. Now, she’s onto organizing a tight limited schedule of outdoor, socially-distanced, in-person visits.

“We had to adapt to that, because we can’t have outside people coming in and doing music,” Vanderkooi says. “We can’t have outside people coming in and doing a fun activity, so that’s been really hard. So it’s mostly an individual approach.”

Brian Barnes, CEO of Blakeford Life, a Nashville-based company that offers multiple types of senior care, is quick to sing the praises of what they call their Life Enrichment team.

“They’ve really been the conduit to keeping our families connected with our residents and keeping our residents — on a daily basis — active, giving them something to do, keeping them engaged,” he says “They’ve really done a remarkable job during this pandemic. They cover a lot of bases.”

Earl says this is also a time that has seen plenty of nursing home caregivers quit, because of the additional stress and responsibilities brought on by the pandemic. In many cases, they can make more money “flipping burgers,” she says.

“People really cannot understand the extra load that our providers and their staff are carrying each and every day, while smiling and keeping their residents encouraged and their families as content as possible,” Earl says. “Nobody can really understand that unless they have spent time walking in their shoes.”