Election Security

Things have changed quite a bit.

And there's been a lot of study on an election official's job.

I serve on a national panel called the Election Workforce Advisory Council, and they've been trying to do more study about the type of work we do and what are the challenges that we encounter.

And they've noticed that in the last 25 years, things have really changed.

They tried to find a...

If there is such a thing as an election official designation in the Department of Labor's occupational framework, there isn't.

They couldn't find one.

And so because of that, then they went to the work to trying to establish what that job would be like.

And could I ask who you think what kind of work that we do as an election official? We count the ballots, of course, but more generically, you know, what kind of what kind of job do we have when you think about compared to other jobs within the county? Great, great answer, yes.

Yes.

Safety.

Yes.

And legal compliance.

Right.

We follow the laws.

So that really created this great framework in that the occupation includes, they said, knowledge, occupational profiles.

that look the most like election officials are generally related to compliance, like a compliance manager, oversight, and security.

Some of these neighboring occupations include, for example, compliance managers, security managers, and emergency management directors.

So no wonder why I've been working with our county OEM manager for the last couple of weeks, because we've been going through all these scenarios about preparing the office for an evacuation for this or for that.

For example, if the power went out in our building, what would we do on election night? And we're going through those types of scenarios.

We would always do some of that planning 20 years ago, but things are much more heightened today as, hey, we have to take these types of scenarios more seriously.

And so a good example for us in Oregon was before the Supreme Court made their decision, what was it, maybe a month ago now? whether or not the post office was going to have some be able to have some restrictions as to who was going to receive our uh which voters were going to receive our ballots or if they would just shut us down completely these were things we had to think about and there was a number of us counties who were talking about amongst each other what we would do if that was the case And even some county leadership.

I was in some meetings with county leadership talking about these.

And I said, well, how are we going to distribute 281,000 ballots to voters without the mail service? How would we do that, right? We don't have the infrastructure for polling places, for example, or anything like that.

Many of the clerks don't even know how to run a polling place.

Things have changed quite a bit.

And there's been a lot of study on an election official's job.

I serve on a national panel called the Election Workforce Advisory Council, and they've been trying to do more study about the type of work we do and what are the challenges that we encounter.

And they've noticed that in the last 25 years, things have really changed.

They tried to find a...

If there is such a thing as an election official designation in the Department of Labor's occupational framework, there isn't.

They couldn't find one.

And so because of that, then they went to the work to trying to establish what that job would be like.

And could I ask who you think what kind of work that we do as an election official? We count the ballots, of course, but more generically, you know, what kind of what kind of job do we have when you think about compared to other jobs within the county? Great, great answer, yes.

Yes.

Safety.

Yes.

And legal compliance.

Right.

We follow the laws.

So that really created this great framework in that the occupation includes, they said, knowledge, occupational profiles.

that look the most like election officials are generally related to compliance, like a compliance manager, oversight, and security.

Some of these neighboring occupations include, for example, compliance managers, security managers, and emergency management directors.

So no wonder why I've been working with our county OEM manager for the last couple of weeks, because we've been going through all these scenarios about preparing the office for an evacuation for this or for that.

For example, if the power went out in our building, what would we do on election night? And we're going through those types of scenarios.

We would always do some of that planning 20 years ago, but things are much more heightened today as, hey, we have to take these types of scenarios more seriously.

And so a good example for us in Oregon was before the Supreme Court made their decision, what was it, maybe a month ago now? whether or not the post office was going to have some be able to have some restrictions as to who was going to receive our uh which voters were going to receive our ballots or if they would just shut us down completely these were things we had to think about and there was a number of us counties who were talking about amongst each other what we would do if that was the case And even some county leadership.

I was in some meetings with county leadership talking about these.

And I said, well, how are we going to distribute 281,000 ballots to voters without the mail service? How would we do that, right? We don't have the infrastructure for polling places, for example, or anything like that.

Many of the clerks don't even know how to run a polling place.