Katy Owens Hubler

When casting a ballot on Election Day most people don’t give a lot of thought to all the work that went on behind the scenes. Successfully administering an election is a complex proposition—like putting on 90 wedding receptions in one day—all in the public eye.

The public demands perfection when the fate of democracy is at stake. All of this truly makes election administrators the unsung—and often underappreciated—heroes of democracy.

When you ask election administrators how they entered the field, the response is often “I fell into it” or “it just gets in your blood.”

Election administration is complex, exciting and stressful at times, yet the people who make a career of it love it. Most of them, however, didn’t receive any formal training to prepare them for the complexities it involves.

Those include navigating a complex web of federal, state and local law; managing a large number of people, many of them poll workers who only work for one day a year; and in an increasingly technology-dependent world, managing large IT projects.

Today the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota announced an online graduate certificate program that will serve a dual purpose: To provide current election administrators tools to manage the complexities that they face, and to encourage the next generation to get involved in the field.

The program is offered online to provide flexibility,

From a legislative perspective, at least a few of the courses may be of interest to legislative staff who work on election administration policy or even for legislators who dig deeply into democracy issues.

For instance, the curriculum includes a course on Election Law, a Survey on Election Administration and the Politics of Public Affairs, which is touted as a “lively and penetrating dive into the big arguments about democracy that frame concrete decisions about how to organize and administer elections.”

Anyone looking to expand their knowledge of election administration or an exciting continuing education opportunity would do well to take a look at the program.  

Katy Owens Hubler is a senior policy specialist at NCSL.

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