(Story was corrected on Oct. 7 we had unintentional mistake instead of district we had county in the paragraph on county commissioner candidate Jenny Lynn Hooper.)
There are a lot of moving parts in an election. There is the ordering of the ballots, the staffing of the polls and overall ensuring the Board of Elections office is running smoothly.
It takes a special someone to keep all the ducks in a row and normally they are in the director’s seat for decades. Jackson County just got a new director this election cycle.
Jackson County Board of Elections Director, Amanda Allen, was appointed to her position as director on Feb. 26. In her short time as the director, she has successfully run two elections: the primaries in the spring and the Republican primary runoff at the start of the summer and is preparing for the general election on Nov. 5.
Allen is an eighth-generation Jackson County native, being born and raised in Cullowhee. She moved away and earned her bachelor’s degree in English writing from Gilford College in Greensboro, NC, at the peak of the 2008 recession.
With her aspirations of going into the journalism field halted by the recession, she turned to work in the public sector working in human resources for Southwestern Community College where she stayed for over 10 years.
Allen started pursuing her master’s in human resources at WCU two months before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the country.
“That colored my experience just because all of our lives were in chaos,” Allen said. “I’m happy to be a purple and gold person. I hang my diploma with pride because that was something that I did working full time, going to school, did it in two years raising a three-year-old in a pandemic.”
Working in human resources for over 10 years and earning a master’s degree in the field provides Allen with years of experience for a position that is administration-centered.
Around 2018, Allen found herself curious about the election process and how the system worked due to some discourse on the integrity of the system. She started volunteering as a precinct worker for 6 years working her way up from an entry-level poll worker to a Democratic partisan judge.
When the director position opened up, the employees at the Jackson County Board of Elections convinced her to put in her application with the county. Six months later, she is running the operations for her first presidential election.
“It’s a big job. It’s a stressful job,” Allen said. “I’ve been here for about six months, and this is my third election in six months, it’s been crazy. You are always counting down to the next [election] and [looking for] what we need to do better, how do we need to move forward.”
But the past six months have not been all sunshine and rainbows. A group called Conservatives for Jackson County, have started a petition calling for Allen and Kirk Stephens, the chairman of the Board of Elections, resignations.
This comes in light of Jenny Lynn Hooper’s voter registration not matching the district she was running in. After the district lines were redrawn, Hooper’s voter registration changed from District 3, where she is running for Jackson County Board of Commissioners, to District 1.
This discrepancy was discovered after a routine data audit which ensures that all information is current and up to date.
“We have to keep on top of data,” Allen said. “We want to make sure our voter rolls are as accurate as possible. In a process when we were doing list maintenance that is very routine, we discovered there was a mistake in the data, we fixed it and a candidate that is running for office, her jurisdictions changed based on the way the data was cleaned. We’ve been in communication with that person and their party.”
There has been no action taken to remove Hooper from the ballot. For action to be taken, a citizen must protest her candidacy, and it would be put under review by the five-member board consisting of two Republican members, two Democratic members, both of which are appointed by their party and the chairman who is appointed by the North Carolina Governor.
This controversy came about because of a misunderstanding of Allen’s role. As director, she performs operational duties such as managing bills, ensuring ballot orders are fulfilled and that the elections run smoothly. The power lies with the board members.
“I’m not queen of the world in this office,” Allen said. “There are a lot of checks and balances. We do research, we bring those things to the board, they choose some actions, we act them out. We aren’t willy-nilly changing things. I am a conduit of the State Board’s interpretation of law or their processes and our board of directors.”
Allen is not a creature of change; she intends to make a career out of working for the Board of Elections.
“I am not a big change person,” Allen said. “This is something I hope to do for a while. The Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, she’ll say ‘elections just gets in your blood. It’s an addiction that you are passionate about it and you just don’t want to give up on it.’”
