Trust and Accessibility: Supervisor of Elections, Ron Turner, on the Elections Process in Sarasota County

Well, and that was sort of where I was going to head next next.

I'm understanding your responsibilities, but what does that actually look like? What is your team doing?

Yeah, so, you know, I think a lot of people think we work two days every two years and the rest of the time I'm on a Royal Caribbean cruise.

But that is not how any of this works.

It takes a lot of planning when you think of planning events, right? Yeah.

Of course, the Patterson Foundation plans events or amazing things.

Well, think about planning an election.

That's probably the biggest event in the county that you can plan.

I say I think probably only Publix the day before Thanksgiving can understand what we go through because almost everyone is a customer and they're coming to us.

either at the same time or a short defined period of time.

So no one has the customer base other than, like I said, Publix the day before Thanksgiving maybe.

But we have multiple locations throughout the county.

We have an office in Northport.

Venice, downtown Sarasota that are public facing.

We have a large election operations center, which is mostly back office operations with our voting system and the bulk of our staff there.

That's on Fruitville Road.

And we've been in that building two years.

And then we also have a warehouse facility out beyond the interstate as well.

We have 37 FTEs, full-time equivalents, for an election.

We hire about 1,000 or more poll workers.

And in addition to that...

In an election cycle, I also hire about 500 temporary or seasonal staff that work in our different offices.

They help our staff in our warehouse.

They help, you know, opening vote-will-mill ballots.

We have a call center that looks like a QVC call center.