Coralyn Colladay has been working at polling places in Maryland since the 2016 presidential election. For the Republican—something of a rarity in solidly blue Montgomery County—it’s a way to participate beyond simply casting a ballot.

“I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s a way to give back to the community,” she says.

But Colladay, who is 77 and lives in Kensington, recently made a difficult decision: Come November’s presidential election, she won’t be offering to help serve as an election judge again.

“I am right in the middle of the at-risk population,” she concedes.

And she should know: Before retiring, Colladay worked as a biologist at the National Institutes of Health and a health attorney with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Now, though, the pandemic has left her homebound; her six kids handle the grocery shopping. Colladay says that with some people still failing to wear masks or maintain social distance, she can’t imagine sitting inside a polling place for 13 hours.

And she’s not the only one. With November 3 less than three months off, officials in both D.C. and Maryland are reporting a dramatic shortage of poll workers that do everything from check in voters to helping them cast ballots. Without the proper staffing, many election officials say it will be hard to open enough polling places—or that the polling places that do open will be beset by long lines.

The problem is especially acute in Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan has ordered that the state’s 1,700 polling places open as usual in November. That’s a reversal from June, when the state conducted most of the primary by mail. And it poses a significant challenge for Maryland’s 24 county election boards, which will have to recruit a combined 20,000 poll workers statewide—a number that can be challenging even in normal years.

“In the midst of the public health crisis, it’s going to be very difficult if not impossible to make up for the election shortfall,” says David Garreis, the president of the Maryland Association of Election Officials.

In late-July, the group sent a letter to Hogan warning that election boards across the state were already facing a shortage of almost 14,000 poll workers.

An Age Problem

The problem stems in part from the demographics of poll workers across the U.S.: they tend to be older. During the 2016 general election, Pew Research found that 56% of U.S. poll workers were 61 years and older—tending to mirror the demographics of voters.

“These are people who generally have a stronger sense of civic duty, oftentimes have more flexibility in their schedule,” says Todd Belt, a professor in The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

But their age also makes many poll workers significantly more vulnerable to the pandemic. At the peak of the nation’s COVID-19 death count in mid-April, 92% of those who died of the virus were above the age of 55, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even in the first weeks of the pandemic in the spring, election officials in the Washington region knew they would have a problem.

“We were getting calls from workers saying that they would not be available to participate in this, in the June election, because of the virus. They were dropping off pretty daily and frequently. We knew we were going to be in trouble,” says Alice Miller, director of the D.C. Board of Elections, which opted to open 20 polling places for the city’s June 2 primary instead of the usual 144.

“They are reliable poll workers. We clearly understood why they didn’t want to be in a situation where their health would be at risk. You have to respect that,” she adds.

That’s the conclusion Rebecca Wilson, 67, quickly came to. She lives in Prince George’s County, where more than one-third of poll workers have said they won’t be returning this year. “Like most election judges, I’m a senior with underlying health conditions. Working in a polling place is a physically demanding job, even without a pandemic,” she says.

Fewer Polling Places, Younger Poll Workers?

Election officials and local county boards of elections are considering a number of options. In his letter to Hogan, Garreis said one possible solution would be “to consolidate polling places in order to manage in-person voting with … available resources.”

Last week, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks sent a letter to the Maryland State Board of Elections requesting 15 poll sites for early and Election Day voting. Alsobrooks said the county is facing a shortage of almost 1,200 workers out of the 3,500 it would need during a traditional election.

“And that’s just something we’re not going to be able to do in the middle of a pandemic. Many of the venues that normally serve as polling places, such as senior centers, churches, and private halls, have withdrawn,” Alsobrooks told reporters at a press conference last week.

As of last week, Montgomery County is short 1,500 poll workers, and Anne Arundel County still needs 1,200. Those counties’ election officials also intend to send a letter to the state board of elections to request consolidating polling places. But Hogan opposes that, saying in a letter this week that any such move would result in “voter suppression and disenfranchisement on a significant scale”—and largely in minority communities.

The state board is expected to review counties’ requests to consolidate voting precincts during their Wednesday meeting.

Officials are also looking to younger generations to pick up some of the slack. According to Gilberto Zelaya, a spokesman with the Montgomery County Board of Elections, while the national average age for poll workers is 62, the county’s average is a little over 49.

“There’s a balance between serving the electorate and make sure we can serve our voters and make sure the election process is transparent, secure and safe,” Zelaya says.

In Montgomery County—which since 2004 has run Future Vote, a program to employ high school students at the polls—17-year-old Charlotte Sanford is stepping up.

“The first idea was that I wanted to get paid,” she says, chuckling. “I can’t vote, which I’m pretty mad about, so I might as well do something to help.”

Students like Sanford can receive a stipend of up to $310, or 25 service learning hours for high school graduation requirements.

D.C. has also worked in the past to recruit younger poll workers, but given the significant demand this year, election officials say they will count working at a poll toward the required number of hours of community service students need to graduate from high school. That’s exactly what Linda Softli, who is 75 and has worked the polls in D.C. for more than two decades, says she wants to see.

“I think it’s necessary,” she says. “This is not the old woman’s job or the old man’s job or somebody that doesn’t have anything to do. I think we need high school students. We need college students. We need the young people there.”

Still, Alice Miller of the D.C. Board of Elections—which plans on opening 80 polling places on November 3—foresees challenges from bringing on a whole new cadre of poll workers in less than three months.

“When you have workers who’ve been doing this process, they’re familiar with it and they know it. And so it’s always better to have more people who are more familiar than to train because a lot of the training may have to be virtual depending on where we are,” she says.

But for Rev. Kobi Little, the political action chair of Maryland’s NAACP, anyone working the polls—regardless of age—is a risk that doesn’t have to be taken. “We’re hoping we can reduce the number of people who are exposed to working full days and coming in contact with numerous voters,” he says.

And the best way is to do what Maryland did for the primary: Send every registered voter their ballot in the mail. Hogan has already opted against that, but Miller says D.C. will be doing it ahead of November. If more people vote from home, she reasons, that means fewer people at the polls.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.