Each month, NCSL’s elections and redistricting team interviews a local election official or legislative election leader to highlight the work officials and legislators are doing to improve election policy and administration in the U.S. To see other installments in this series, visit Election Conversations.
What do a pharmacist and a local election official have in common?
“We’re both persnickety,” says Bill Burgess, a former pharmacist who has been the clerk of Marion County, Ore., for 20 years. “We want things done properly.”
Burgess jokes that he has kept his license up to date—just in case this elections gig doesn’t work out. He ran for the Salem City Council in 1990 and served for eight and a half years while studying for his master’s degree in public administration. He ran for county clerk in 2004, assumed the position in 2005 and has stuck with it ever since.
So, what caused him to make the jump from the complex molecular structures of pharmacology to the complex structures of running elections? Burgess says growing up in the 1960s and ’70s instilled in him a love of history and a need to make a difference in the world.
Burgess talked with NCSL about election administration and what keeps him coming back day after day.
A lot has changed over the last 20 years. What stands out the most?
Well, technology is ever-changing. We implemented automatic voter registration in 2016. Before that, only about 65% of the voters (who) were eligible were registered to vote. Now we’re to the point that about 93-94% of the (eligible) voters are registered and getting a ballot. Oregon has been running some form of vote-by-mail elections since 1981, and in 1998, a citizen’s initiative passed to adopt universal vote-by-mail, so every active registered voter receives a mail ballot. AVR now helps us keep addresses up to date on voter registration files, and we’re having a lower percentage of ballots coming back undeliverable than we used to have.
Cybersecurity and physical security risks are something that we didn’t think nearly as much about until a few years ago. We’ve experienced an increase in threats to our office and many offices like ours throughout the country. We’ve worked with the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the federal Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency over the last six or eight years doing tabletop exercises and de-escalation training to prepare us for any threats. They’ve helped us secure our facilities with cameras and made IT departments much stronger. All of this security stuff is completely new in response to threats to election workers.
Editor's note: The Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency have recently experienced personnel cuts and loss of federal funding. It is unclear if the services discussed here will be available in the future.
In what ways have you worked with the Oregon Legislature?
I’ve frequently met with individual legislators and testified a few times over the years. In 2020, I was the president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks and led legislative issues for the association during that time. Our association’s legislative committee helps us with legislation on the elections side and on the records side. They look at all of the bills—there’s a couple thousand—and they seek out the ones that affect our local offices.
What is your favorite part of the job and what keeps you coming back?
Sometimes, it’s the problems we get to solve. Ninety-eight percent of the time, things go just fine, but there can be times when we get to help a voter understand the process. I love seeing new voters, especially in the case where someone has just become a new citizen. There’s so much joy in working with voters. I love seeing my staff work so diligently. We don’t have polling places in Oregon, but we still have up to 100 people processing ballots in our office. These people know that they could be targets of threats, yet they continue with determination to get the job done.
Elections give us hope for the future, and they are a crucial part of democracy that we must uphold not only for today, but for future generations. It is important to continually earn people’s trust in elections. We’re all in this world together to make it a better place, and this job allows me to contribute to this idea.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.