Counting up the memories

Elections officers tally changes in process over years

EPHRATA — Spectators flooded into rooms in the Grant County Courthouse last year to watch poll workers hand count votes for Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire. Faith Anderson thinks more voters saw how open elections are in Grant County during that time than any other.

Anderson, who has been in the elections office for more than a quarter-century, has seen her fair share of elections firsthand. She started working part time in the department in 1976. She had been working for the Moses Lake School District when the county needed help and hired her. She hasn't left the elections office since, but much of the way she does her job and the way Grant County voters cast their ballots has changed.

"We're more automated," she said. "When I started I was a key punch operator; most people probably don't know what that is now."

Anderson's 26 years in elections is the longest of the three in the office. Fellow elections worker Sue Ramaker has been with the department for 15 years and Trisha Olson is the newest member of the elections office staff.

Anderson grew up in the Basin but went to Seattle to go to school to be a keypunch operator in 1969.

"I was living over in Seattle and needed a job," Anderson said of how she got into keypunch operation. "Computers were just coming out, and they had a school over there. I've had a job ever since."

The keypunch system went away with the innovation of monitors. And lever voting machines are also a thing of the past. The county has been using optical scan ballots since 1990.

But the change in machines isn't the only one the county elections department has seen over the years, as Anderson said the laws change every year. Constantly changing codes means nothing is ever the same for Anderson in the department, especially during elections.

"There was never a dull moment during elections," Anderson said. "I think that's what kept me here so long. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of stress."

That stress comes from the task of getting 32,000 ballots out during elections, and sometimes getting calls from angry voters frustrated about an election. But Anderson said that since the county's recent switch to conducting all elections through the mail, the pressure of conducting both an at-the-polls elections and an absentee election has been cut in half.

The department has about a month when things aren't as busy each year, but makes up for that downtime during the rest of the elections seasons. Anderson said the office is always busy with registrations, working with candidates or school districts or any of the number of activities that can come up before and after an election.

No matter what time of the year, Anderson and Ramaker said elections officials find many voters have questions or misconceptions they need answered and will call or stop into the elections office. One of the most common misconceptions, they said, is that some people think they have to pay to register to vote.

Others call to have the elections office settle a dispute for them.

"They call in and say 'I have a bet you can solve for me,'" Anderson said. "I wish I would have written down all the things that have happened all these years, I could have written a book."

Having to send sheriff's deputies to pickup ballots in bad weather, or the time a tie between two candidates was settled by a coin toss are just a few of the things Anderson says have made working in the elections office eventful. Every once in a while, Anderson said, poll workers have left and gone to dinner after closing the polls before turning in their results. But those poll workers have been a great help over the years, and Anderson said they would still be willing to help if they were needed.

The all-mail election switch is another big change for absentee voters, who 25 years ago had to be a senior citizen or disabled to qualify for absentee voting. Anderson said she thinks the whole state could be an absentee state in the next two to three years as more than 30 of the state's 39 counties have already gone that route.

Voters do call in angry, or have written nasty notes on their ballots about the process. Anderson and Ramaker said they try to get those voters to come in and see the process of vote counting, which Anderson said is always open to the public. In her time in the office, Anderson has witnessed the open public nature of the election process, a process she said others saw during the hand recount in that governor's race in 2004.

"It really is an honest process," Anderson said, "I've never seen any fraud over my 26 years here."

Elections officers are county jobs which people tend to stick with, Anderson has heard from attending elections conferences. And she said working for Auditor Bill Varney, who oversees the department, has also made the job easier. Even after 26 years, Anderson said she had no idea this would be the job she would hold for such a long time.

"I just lucked out and fell into this job and I've stayed," she said.