Republished with permission from Governing.com, by Carl Smith
One day.
That’s how long it took to turn Michelle Burchill’s ideas about election administration upside down.
In 2020, Burchill took a voter registration job in the recorder’s office in Yavapai County, a rural jurisdiction in Arizona. A Republican and Donald Trump supporter, she didn’t like the way social media platforms were censoring his speech. She’d encountered plenty of claims about “rigged elections” and Russian collusion.
“I was an election skeptic, for sure,” she says.
Her first day on the job, March 17, was a presidential preference election day, in which Democratic voters would choose their preferred presidential nominee. Burchill had never worked in election administration, and her boss told her to just come “soak it all in.” Watch. Listen. Learn.
She showed up at 6 a.m. If anyone really was trying to change an election outcome, she reasoned, it would have to be an inside job. Now she was on the inside, with access to everything. She followed ballots through each process, from intake to signature verification to tabulation.
As she watched, she asked herself, “If there is a bad actor in this office, if there is a loophole, where is it in the process?” She saw each process was followed by an audit. “I realized that if something happened, these people would catch it,” she says.
There wouldn’t be an election winner or loser in the usual sense. It was a matter of helping Democratic party leaders gauge member preferences. But by midday, phones were ringing off the hooks. Burchill decided she could help at least a little by answering calls.
She picked up a phone and said, “Voter registration, this is Michelle speaking. Please be patient. This is my first day.” The caller said he was calling from Baghdad (an unincorporated community in the county).
“I don’t need your help,” he said. “I need you to jump or drive off a cliff and kill yourself.”
“Those were his exact words to me,” Burchill says. “I went, ‘Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.’”
She remembers this moment vividly, remembers exactly where she was sitting. It was around 1 p.m. She looked around at her new co-workers, on the job seven hours already, scrambling, multitasking, doing “a million things.”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this really is a thankless job,’” she says. “These people are just trying to do the best they can to make this election work.”
Respecting Every Vote
Voting was closed, but the work went on. Arizona divides election administration between a recorder and an elections director. The recorder is responsible for voter registration, early voting, signature verification and voter rolls. The election director oversees ballot building, election-day voting and tabulation.
Around 9 p.m., ongoing audits found a one-ballot discrepancy between the recorder side and the election side.
Everything stopped.
Before this first day on the “inside,” Burchill held fiercely to the belief that every vote counts. Exhausted after 14 hours on the job, she found herself thinking, “It’s one ballot. What’s the big deal?”
The registrar handed out batches of ballots, and workers recounted them. Eventually, a clerk found two ballots stuck together. The discrepancy was resolved.
Burchill’s exhaustion gave way to a moment of epiphany. Every vote really did count.
“I was very humbly woken up,” she recalls. “I knew these people were in it for the right reasons, doing everything they could to make sure the integrity was what it should be. I got the bug, and I’ve been passionate about it ever since.”
A Door Opened
Burchill hadn’t worked in government before her elections job. Election skepticism aside, she wasn’t a fan. She and her three siblings all spent time in the foster care system when her parents were unable to provide for them. “I’ve seen and dealt with a lot of bad things in government, from an early age,” she says.
She began to pay more attention to politics when Trump came along. She felt she’d been forgotten in foster care and liked the idea of putting the interests of American families first. Burchill still supports him, she says, even though he says “stupid things” at times. But she is adamant that politics has no place in election administration.
She had accepted a position in the state Department of Economic Security when she was offered the elections job, but a lingering bad experience from 2016 spurred her to take the new offer and get involved in her community’s election process. She’d lived and voted in California at that time. Her polling place was the gym at her daughter’s elementary school. The total lack of security set off alarm bells. She found the rap music blasting from speakers was obscenely inappropriate.
She didn’t like that she wasn’t asked for an ID. A ballot box looked suspiciously homemade, something she now suspects was an improvised response to an overfull “official” box. When she came home, she told her husband that somehow, some way, she would end up working in elections.
Taking the election job meant a big pay cut, but her prediction had come true. A door had opened and she knew she needed to walk through it. The 2020 presidential election was just months away.
The Worst Election in a Decade
Burchill was still working in voter registration during the 2020 election. Yavapai county had almost a month of early voting, and the first unexpected event was an almost tenfold increase in voters showing up well before Election Day. “We had lines out the door, around the building pretty consistently,” she says.
Staff were puzzled about orders to continue processing new registrations until they learned a lawsuit had extended the registration period. Tens of thousands of new registrations had to be processed after the previous cutoff date.
Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the county was almost two to one. Everything about the 2020 election was strange, Burchill says, but Yavapai wasn’t pulled into the most divisive post-election fights.
The 2022 election was a different story. “That will probably be the worst election in a decade in Arizona,” she says. The governor, the secretary of state and the attorney general jobs were all on the line. Anger and resentment that had been simmering over the 2020 results boiled over.
Burchill had been promoted to executive assistant to the recorder. Her boss hinted that she should move up the ladder, but she knew the schedule would consume her nights and weekends. It upset her that police had to patrol around her boss’s home. Her dogs had been poisoned.
She could sense that her boss was on the way out in June, just before the primary. She was offered a job on the election side, as election manager, but she wanted to stay where she was. Within 59 days, the elections manager, the elections director and the recorder all quit. “We lost 40 years of experience,” Burchill says. All these jobs fell to her.
“I’m a go-getter and all, but it was rough,” she says. She had some help from the county manager but most of the day-to-day responsibilities were her responsibility. When her boss left, she was appointed recorder.
“I worked 77 days straight for that election,” she says. “Nights, weekends, everything. I missed my daughter’s 18th birthday party that had been planned forever.” Burchill recalls carrying a trash can with her as she walked through the equipment warehouse where election preparations were underway. Her nerves were shot and she had to be ready in case she needed to throw up.
The Next Curveball
Her team made it through, but hundreds of people showed up at county offices to protest. Burchill took the names of everyone who made a complaint. All but one claimed irregularities that were impossible in her county, involving things such as on-site tabulation that it doesn’t do. She followed up with each person, set the record straight, and received apologies from all — with the exception of the person who had a legitimate complaint. She apologized to him.
“I’m going to bite back,” she says. “I grew up a fighter.” Moving forward, she’s made it a point to meet with both Democratic and Republican leaders in the county each month. “We sit in a room, and we talk about the elephants in the room,” she says. If something went wrong or needs to be improved, a bipartisan solution is found.
Burchill earned a new four-year term as recorder in the 2024 general election. Her biggest motivation was her commitment to the seven people in her office. “They supported me and lifted me up, and I want to be there to support them,” she says.
At present much of her time is spent watching for the next curveball that could be coming at elections administrators. “I listen to C-SPAN and watch congressional hearings every single day,” she says. “I watch everything during legislative sessions here in Arizona.”
She might not be an “election skeptic” anymore, but she maintains a critical perspective. She trusts the results but sees room for improvement, in her state and in others.
“With the support of our elected officials, with the support of our government, maybe we can all be on the same side and come to some really positive improvements to help our communities trust the system,” she says.
“But they have to talk to us, and right now it doesn’t appear a lot of people are talking to the people that do the work,” she says. “That’s our biggest downfall right now. Talk to us, we have a lot of great ideas.”
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