Episode Transcript: Brianna Lennon
Episode Introduction
Brianna
I like your shirt.
Mara
I know I was gonna say I this is like 100% planned. My election nerd shirt…
Mara
Hello, dear friends. Welcome to the inaugural relaunch episode of What Voting Means to Me. I am your host, Mara Suttmann-Lea. To vote is to participate in community. It's not the only way, and it is certainly not sufficient, at least from some perspectives, but it is at minimum a foundational act of community participation. That's what voting means to this episode's guest, Brianna Lennon, the county clerk for Boone County, Missouri. Before I tell you about Brianna, I want to first welcome everyone back to the 2024 relaunch of this podcast, and introduce this year's theme, which is all about community, a subject that comes up in this interview and many others in the pipeline.
There are several questions I have been asking myself about the nature of community and democracy over the last few years, and I thought I might pose them to my listeners. What is the role of community in democracy? What is the role of democracy in community? What does it mean to build community? The late representative John Lewis from the state of Georgia reminds us that democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we call the beloved community, a nation and world society at peace with itself. So I've been thinking a lot about what I'm doing to build the beloved community, and that's part of what this podcast is all about. What are you doing? What does community and democracy and voting mean to you?
Today, we hear from a remarkable person in the elections community, Brianna Lennon, the County Clerk for Boone County, Missouri since 2019. I have been a fan of Brianna for many years, especially since I started doing my own work in voter education, and this interview was such a delight. There was so much that we talked about and could have talked about. It was really hard to cut this episode down to a somewhat manageable time. Brianna is one of the thousands of election officials and workers across the country who have had to intentionally cultivate a community of support and care in recent election years in response to threats to their offices and the infrastructure of American democracy.
In this episode, Brianna and I talk about how a government teacher piqued her own curiosity in local government. This is something I can personally relate to. And her path to where she is today as an administrator of democracy. We discuss her approach to communicating with her constituents. By my account, she was one of the very first election officials to use TikTok.
We also talk about the challenges of poll worker recruitment and the fascinating logistical challenge that is administering elections in the United States. The way I look at voting, Breanna tells us, is that it is probably the only time where every single person in a community has an equal say in what's happening. Please enjoy this inaugural relaunch episode of What Voting Means to Me.
If you want to talk to me, Mara Suttmann-Lea, about what voting means to you, go to what slash participate to request an interview, or if you're microphone shy, you can also share your written responses on that same page.
We don't yet have financial sponsors at what voting means to me, but this is your friendly reminder that this podcast is quite literally made possible by democracy.
Episode
Mara
Thank you so much for coming on and being a part of the relaunch. If it's okay with you, we can just go ahead and get started with that first question, which I frame as a democracy origin story, but I often ask folks, what's your first memory of living in a democracy?
Brianna
I had a really good government teacher in high school who cared very deeply, especially about local governments. So he was very proud of his origin. He's like born and raised in St. Louis and he loves St. Louis. And so he, as a government teacher, taught electives like the history of St. Louis and did field trips around and stuff like that. And he was also, we're required in Missouri to take a constitution of Missouri test. It's open book, so it's not like it's the world's most difficult test, but you do get familiarized with the Missouri constitution. I was not originally from Missouri, and so all of my previous history education of like local areas had actually been about the Iroquois, because I had grown up in central New York, and so a lot of the elementary school program of talking about the Iroquois nation, which was fascinating anyway, but then to come into Missouri and have a very, very different kind of education about history really piqued my interest in researching and learning and writing about things. And so I knew that I really loved political science and government.
And I never, I won't say that I like made an immediate connection to how that involved voting and getting involved in elections. But I think it was always kind of there in the background.
Mara
Yeah, and this is a story that it's not everyone's story, of course, but the teacher or the adult figure in your high school or middle school life that turns you on to thinking about these things and thinking about the world a little bit differently is something that I hear quite often. And so now the next question I have is, this peaks an interest in political science and government.
What happens after that? What's the next move for you?
Brianna
I decided really early on when I was looking at college that I wanted to do political science. I started as political science and journalism because I just wanted to write. I loved writing. I wanted to do policy research. I wanted to like summarize things and...I had all of that planned out until I got to...like the middle of college, like my junior year of college. And the college that I picked, Truman State University, it's wonderful, had a program where you could take an entire semester and go live in the Capitol and intern for a state representative or a state senator, executive branch office. And that was really great. It was one of the things that drew me to the school because I really liked that program and the professor that was there.
I had all of that planned out. And then once I did that internship, I started falling into more campaign stuff because that I feel like is naturally what happens when you end up working for a state rep, even in their official capacity, you start learning more about the political side of things. But I also had a friend that was interning in the Secretary of State's office at the same time. So I started getting to know some of the people that were in the Secretary of State's office and stuff and became friends with them, really liked them, but then also found a way to get into that office because I was really excited to learn more about how the Secretary of State's office worked with democracy. And at that point, I had done internships with the League of Women Voters and had just really loved the concept of voting and voting rights the summer before I started law school.
So I decided after mulling around whether to try to pursue a PhD in political science or go into a law degree program, ended up going for the law degree program at Mizzou because of its proximity to the state capital. Because once I started learning more about the state capital the more I wanted to see if I could actually get a job there. That was my first experience in the elections administration world, was interning in the Secretary of State's office. It was a fascinating time to be involved in state government because it was really at the cusp of like this, I think everyone pretty much agrees now that Missouri is a red state and we have swung in that direction. But at the time that I was getting into all of this work, it was still very much a purple state. It was very, very much a swing state.
Mara
Yeah, I do remember, I feel like Missouri went for Obama in 2008, am I misremembering that? I feel like if there was going to be a year for it to swing blue, that that would have been the year. It doesn't matter. In any case, yes, I've sort of watched that trend,
So I'm going to ask you a question that I really love asking my students at the end of my election administration class, but I want to hear your own narrative surrounding this question. So you get into the state, you know, state government interning with the secretary of state. What was...like most shocking or surprising to you, if anything, maybe you're very well versed in election administration before you dove into this world, but what was like the most shocking or surprising to you about the process that you learned?
Brianna
I think the fact that it was one of my first jobs makes it hard to kind of identify what would have been shocking because it was just a first job anyway. So like all of it was just like, ah. Yeah, so much. And I don't know and getting used to working in an office and things like that.
I will say though, maybe this is cheating on this question, but so I started in state elections administration before I moved to local government administration. And so for the time that I was in the state role, I talked to a lot of county clerks and we interacted and we had different committees that we would get feedback on and I would go to all the conferences, but there was a very clear delineation. Stuff that we worked on at the state level was not understood by the county clerks. We did a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure big statewide things worked. While I was there, we had to handle a statewide recount, but the recount itself is handled by the county clerks. And so I felt like I was investing a lot of time getting into these details and laws about making sure that all this stuff worked correctly and trying to improve all the different parts of it moving into this the local rule.
It's not that I didn't know what I was getting into, because I definitely knew what I was getting into, and I wanted to get into it, but the number of things now where I just go, oh man, if I had realized what that decision that I helped make was going to have an impact on at the local level, which is arguably where all of the election administration is actually happening. I mean, and I get that I have the privilege of being able to look back on it and say, oh, you know, I wish I had done all these things. And maybe I wouldn't have, you know, even if the roles were reversed. But I think the shocking things that I didn't internalize at the time were things that seemed pretty innocuous and easy decisions at the state level were actually far more nuanced when it came to how local offices operated. And while I understand that this part of the reason I think why it looks simple at the state level is because there is no way to adequately internalize decision making for 116 different election authorities and do it in a way that makes everybody happy. So you have to kind of take that distance.
There are still things that fundamentally alter the way that your office processes things. And if you have a small office and you're used to one process and the state changes something, and they don't tell you in advance or they don't ask you if it's going to affect you, and they just flip a switch and now it doesn't work that way anymore and you are just reacting. I wish I had been more collaborative in the state's role than I was.
And I think that that's what surprised me the most is how much room there is for collaboration and how much better we could be if we were collaborating. And do you feel like now in your role as a county clerk that you are an advocate for that or do you not have the capacity, just given all of your responsibilities and the current climate that election administrators are having to navigate? No, I think, I mean, I would like to think that I'm an advocate, but it's, you know, every relationship is a two-way street. Secretary of State offices are inherently more political than the local level because they have to be because they're a statewide elected office. So there's not a lot of political upside to working with a bunch of bureaucrats at the local level and so it makes it difficult to do that. So I am I'm happy to advocate for that but unfortunately the reciprocal nature of things. I'm not sure how likely it is to change. And I feel like that is a story that a lot of local election authorities have that I wish there was a better way.
I feel like it would probably require more systems level changes to things. And it sounds like incentive changes to things, like you said, political, changing the political incentives for that type of collaboration. And that's really helpful for anyone who is listening, who, you know, maybe isn't as deeply ingrained administration as you and I are to understand the, yes, many local offices are elected, but they are, well...at least up until a couple of years ago, far less political than these statewide elected office for secretaries of state. And it is a consistent theme that I see in the data that I look at and the interviews that I do and just informal conversations that I have with election officials when we ask them, you know, what's the one change that you would like to see? And many of them revolve around this dynamic between their state election office and the work that they do at the local level.
Mara
So I can't have this interview go by without asking you about voter education because you know, that's my and Lia Merivaki’s jam and you are one of the... we fangirl over you. We love the work that you do. And I guess there's so many questions I could ask, but I think what I really want to know is maybe just tell us a little bit about your overall approach to connecting with voters, but I think I'd also really like to know if and how you feel things have changed over the last couple of years, really since the 2020 elections.
Brianna
One of the central goals, and I hesitate to say that this is true for every election office, but in my community for sure, having the university here having a higher than average number of people that come here because they have a college degree or things like that. You know, like having an engaged electorate at very different levels with very different demographics of people that are engaged. I feel like it would be doing a disservice to this community if we weren't trying to do ongoing community outreach in voter education.
It's hard, I think, because we're in this middle ground of, we're big enough to require that, but we're small enough that we don't have a great way of operationalizing, whether it's achieving anything, really. I mean, we do it because we think it's important. Yes. Can we put a price tag on it or a, um, you know, straight line of, well, we did this voter education, and it turned into this voter turnout, I think is much, much more difficult. But, which is not to say I wouldn't love to try to do that, but then it's an issue of resources and time to be able to put that together. So, my approach has just been to do as much education as we possibly can get the people in the office excited about the idea of doing community outreach so that they want to go out and do it too. And then build as many relationships as possible to try to make sure that we are everywhere that we could possibly be. So if there's a resource fair happening, we have a table if there is something that we can do to try to get into schools. So like last week we ran the student council election for a middle school.
Mara
Oh my God, that's so cool.
Brianna
Which was amazing but also totally chaotic because it was the first time we had ever tried to do it and the first time the school had ever tried to do it and we had to get 720 kids voted in an hour.
Mara
Oh my God.
Brianna
So it was awesome and the kids loved it but I think the teachers probably hated me.
But we have good notes for how we can improve it for next time. So yeah, I think that that's really important. Our social media is obviously a big portion of that. And part of that is just because I have my own interest in all things social media. So when we created a TikTok account, it was because I had been spending lockdown, getting sucked into TikTok and thought, oh, we should probably do something for the office on that too. That would be fun. And I could use my creative outlet, which, you know, I really enjoy being able to do. So I think the biggest challenge for the social media stuff is even though we enjoy creating it and doing all of that, it does not go that far. Because at the end of the day, we're still a government office. We don't have a ton of reach. And so the struggle and one of the goals upcoming election is to try to find more organic ways to have the demographics that are using that social media share it themselves or create it themselves or us provide the education to them to create whatever it is that they're creating because we know that that's gonna go farther if a college student is sharing things on snapchat with their friends that they're not gonna share my office's stuff they're gonna share their own so making sure that they're sharing Accurate information is what my priority is. I think in the second half of what you were talking about, has it changed since 2020? We're fairly insulated, it feels like, from a lot of the really detrimental effects of 2020 that a lot of places had. We have not had...threats or any kind of harassment and we've had a lot of I think probably as a as an outgrowth of well things were happening in 2020 laws were changing in 2020 it was confusing and things like that our office's approach was to put out more information than we possibly you know needed to
And you could see that in our social media because we would do something like create an infographic and it would get a hundred shares to social media. And then other county clerks would take it and share it on theirs as well. So it wasn't like we were just sharing it for our own office. It ended up kind of expanding outwards. And I think that that having all of that education increased the trust that people had in us because they knew, well, if something's going to happen, they're going to let us know. Yes, they're the ones that are letting us know if there's a change in the law, if there's an update on a court case, if there's a change to the way that absentee voting is going to work. Nobody's just like, well the voters will figure it out. We wanted to make sure that the voters had all the tools they needed. So by and large the community here really had a positive experience during COVID voting because we tried to do everything we could to make sure that…and while I think there's been some, those doubts have taken on in some places in the community. But 2022 was very quiet.
And we tried to keep doing the same love of voter education. If anything, I would say people become more disengaged, but I don't think that that's going to be the case for 2024. So, um, we've had this kind of reprieve where, you know, we went from in 2020, pushing out all this information and people being like, Oh, this is great. Thank you to pushing out information and nobody paying attention to it because they don't care anymore. Yeah. uh, so in some ways I'm looking forward to 2024 as a level of engagement, because then it won't mean that we're kind of spinning our wheels, trying to put out all of this stuff that we know no one's paying attention to yet. And it's compounded by the fact that this year we didn't, we only have August and November elections in odd numbered years in Missouri. If there's a special election called, we didn't have any elections called in August or November. So in 2023, we've had one election in April and that's it. We've been working on things…getting stuff ready and it's given us breathing room to be able to improve some processes, but voters don't care about our office right now. And I can't blame them, like why would you if no election's coming up? So from a voter education standpoint, it's been a lot of hurry up and wait. Yeah. And in some ways, I wonder, you know, it's voters weren't necessarily paying as much attention in 2022 and obviously have very little reason to in 2023.
Mara
Hopefully when the engagement picks back up in 2024, it will be with some of the foundation that you guys laid in 2020 in terms of understanding processes and where folks need to go and what they need to do. And hopefully you're not starting from scratch. It sounds like you have gotten a good head start. Is there anything else that you'd like to add in terms of what you guys are thinking about for 2024 before we wrap up with that final question?
Brianna
I mean, I would say poll worker recruitment is still at the top of our minds. And so a lot of this year we've spent trying to put programs in place that are going to bring people in. So we're now offering to organizations, I would say probably the University of Missouri would be the biggest one where we're just going into the individual schools like the School of Law and saying, hey, if you wanna recruit poll workers for us or if there are people that you wanna like let know that this is a possibility and you get seven, eight of these people, we will come to you and do the training there. And trying to make it a little more like, okay, well, where are the pockets of a large number and we will just go to them and train them there. And then we don't have to work them into our normal schedule and everything else. They don't have to go through the whole scheduling of, you know, taking time off of doing something. If we can get the school or the business or whoever it is to just let us come in during the workday, then they're not losing their employees to go to training. Hopefully it's increasing the number of people that are wanting to do it because they're seeing their coworkers or their friends do it.
So going into 2024 has been trying to make sure that we have good pipelines to bring people in because it is always a struggle. And in our case, it's always a struggle with a particular political party. We have to have bipartisan election judge teams at every polling location for balance and, uh, one party, even though we lean blue, we're a 55. DPI County. And in my mind, I would say 55 45 is really not that bad of a split. We should have a much more balanced situation really when it comes to voters and poll workers. So we've had to go into creative thinking of, well, where can we go for places that are not inherently political where people won't mind stating what political party they are because they have to in order to be an election judge. Yes. That turns a lot of people off. They wanna do it, but then they don't wanna actually have to like be a political party. They just wanna be independent. Well, We can sometimes take independence in some situations, but we really need people to declare what the party is. So that's right now, I think what's at the top of our minds for this year.
Mara
So I think that now is a great time to kind of zoom out and take that 30,000 foot view with the question that is at the heart of the podcast, is what does voting mean to you?
Brianna
Yeah, I think that is a question that I, when you, when you told me that that's what you were gonna ask me. Anyway, I have struggled with it because I think I go back and forth, in between my periods of absolute abject cynicism and...I think that voting is really important. And voting to me personally means something I think a little bit different than what voting means to the voting to the Like you said, the 30,000 foot view of democracy…I personally think that voting is a, it's a fascinating logistical challenge. It's one, and that's one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much. It's also the way that I look at it, the only, probably the only time where every single person in a community has an equal say in what's happening. And I find that very powerful when it comes to how decisions are made.
I wish that more people saw it that way because I think that's why I vote in every election. And I think a lot of people disagree and say that they don't really have a voice. And I would, and that's that cynical, the abject cynical part of me is right.
Voting is only as good as what you're voting on. And if you're not excited about a candidate or you're not excited about an issue, or you don't think that what you're going to vote on makes a difference because you haven't seen a difference in your daily life, when you've, you know, you're in a, you're in a bad position anyway, you think that there are things that could be improved upon and you have a candidate that you think is going to make that change and then they don't. That's really demoralizing. And why would you vote?
That's the case. So I never wanna tell anybody that they should vote because it's gonna make a difference in their life or because it's going to improve things because maybe it will, maybe it won't. But to me, that's not the reason why you would vote. You vote because you get to participate in the community and this is one way to do it. It is to me, the bare minimum of participation but it's a really good foundation. Yes. So that's the way that I've always looked at it is like, you know, it's not gonna solve all our problems, but if we don't have it, nothing's gonna get solved.
I want to make sure from the office perspective, what voting means to me is that everybody has the ability to access it. I can say all I want that it's easy to vote because I literally just have to walk down the hall and cast my ballot. So obviously it's easy for me. I don't even have to take time off work because it's my literal job. But the fact that, you know, it's not the first thing people think about when they get up in the morning, especially on a random Tuesday. There's other competing interests. There's other very real things that people are trying to like survive in the world. Why would they think about, oh, I got to vote on that, you know utility question that's on the ballot, like I get it, I get it. I'm not so naive that I think that people should just vote for the sake of voting, but if you're going to vote, I want to make sure that voting to people is that it's easy. I want people walking away thinking, oh, that was easy, even in a place where maybe the infrastructure of voting is not easy. We don't have a whole bunch of early voting. We don't have like statewide systems in place to be able to offer certain things. And it's my great honor at the local level to be able to change that for voters.
I think that voting is a fantastic logistical challenge for that reason. Yes. Which is what keeps me interested in it. It gets taken for granted a lot, but I understand why. It's hard for me to get worked up about people that say that they don't vote because they think that it's a...it's its own stance or something like that, or because they don't feel like it's going to make a difference.
Mara
And you hit the sort of the other side of the participation coin so well and talking about folks who feel a lack of efficacy, like they have no choices that are reasonable that are actually going to make a meaningful impact on their lives. As I was listening to you, I just can't help but think about that teacher that you had in high school and his emphasis on local government and local politics that you were talking a little bit about. And something I wish that, and I try to communicate this to my students, that folks were more cognizant of is that you can have a meaningful impact in so many ways at the local level of politics. Even if you don't, oh, I'm voting for the water reclamation district six manager or whatever, whatever it is. There is not only just because you're talking about a smaller number of voices, your voice has a greater impact in that context, but because these are the things that effect so much of our everyday, the ins and outs of our everyday lives.
I think that's a realistic but hopeful way to wrap up in terms of encouraging folks who are listening to think about how they can get involved in local politics. That is all the questions I have. Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we wrap up?
Brianna
I think you covered everything. I think that- I mean, thank you for inviting me to be honored.
Mara
Oh my gosh, Brianna. I am honored. I love how much our work and our paths have crossed over the years and I know that we'll, you know, run into each other at conferences and events and gatherings in the future. And when I was thinking about, you know, the voices that I wanted to bring on as I sort of relaunch and try to get things going again with the podcast, your name just came to the top of mind because...
I really value the work that you do as someone who observes and doesn't participate directly in the administration of elections. I've just come to have like a deep respect for all of the work that you guys do. So I hope that you know how valued you are in like our little academic election sciences community. But I'm sure you're...
Conclusion
What Voting Means to Me was created and is produced by me, Mara Suttmann-Lea. Our excellent and inspirational theme music was composed by my dear spouse, William Lea.