It was the kind of fall day one hopes for on the Oregon coast: sunny with a cool breeze.

“It’s gorgeous,” Tillamook County Clerk Christy Nyseth commented from the driver’s seat. “We live in such a beautiful part of the state.”

Tillamook Bay whizzed by the window as we drove north on Highway 101. It was Oct. 14, the first day ballots for the Nov. 3 election were mailed to Oregon voters. Soon, they’d start coming back.

We headed to a drop site location in Bay City. It’s one of 10 places where Tillamook County voters can return their ballots, and it needed to be prepared to accept ballots. Soon, the car pulled into a small parking lot about a block from the water, in front of City Hall and the local library. And there it was: a locked, blue metal drop box emblazoned with the county seal and the slogan, “Land of Cheese, Trees and Ocean Breeze.”

“One of the things people ask us a lot about are our ballot drop sites. These are all very secure. Only deputized staff have access to them,” she said. “Using drop sites is a really safe way to return your ballot.”

Her keys jangled as she unlocked the box and opened the slot for ballot returns.

“She’s open!” she said as she gave the box an approving pat. With that, she jumped in the car and hit the road back to Tillamook.

This detour from Nyseth’s office inside the Tillamook County Courthouse was just one stop on a busy day for the county’s top election official and record keeper. As county clerk, her office is tasked with maintaining voter records and conducting elections. Year-round, the clerk’s office also handles marriage licenses, passports, property transactions, dog licenses and more. Which is to say, she’s got lots of jobs to do come election season.

“It’s kind of like the story of the man with all the hats,” she said.

For OPB’s “At Work With” series, we wanted to learn more about the work of these nonpartisan officials who administer elections in most Oregon counties, so we tagged along with Clerk Nyseth as she geared up for Election Day.

What are you up to on the first day ballots are mailed off to voters?

Aside from ensuring ballot drop boxes were open for voters, Nyseth and her colleagues made sure there were no ballot labels left in their queue and that all ballots had been sent out.

“It’s also the day that we have to start running through our ballot sorter to get that all calibrated, so we can start processing ballots as they’re coming in through the mail, beginning probably next week,” she said.

The ballot sorter scans the barcodes and signatures on voters’ ballot envelopes, and divides them up into the county’s 29 precincts. It also pulls up the voter’s signature from their voter registration, so Nyseth or a deputy can verify that it matches the one on the envelope.

She updated the system to reflect any new or updated voter registrations and signatures from the previous few weeks, so it will recognize voters when their ballot envelopes come in. This time, it pulled in just over 800 new signatures. She said they’d start running updates every morning as Election Day got closer.

“These are the steps that are in place to ensure that when you cast your vote, it is attributed to you. It’s safe, it’s secure, it’s tied to you. And once you vote your ballot, that’s it. You can only have one active ballot,” she said.

Her office just got the ballot sorter in May, and she’s a big fan. It does the job in about half the time that it used to take to do it by hand.

“We can do it faster, so why wouldn’t we? It’s the best use of taxpayer money. We try to be fiscally responsible,” she said.

What does your office look like in the lead-up to Election Day?

Nyseth said they experience a big uptick in voters coming in to update their voter registration or be issued replacement ballots in the days leading up to an election. Plus, new ballot envelopes arrive to be sorted and verified each day.

On Oct. 28, election workers start opening ballot envelopes and preparing ballots for the tabulator, a machine that counts people’s votes. They work in teams of two, and each pair must be bipartisan — not from the same political party. In a separate area, trained election observers watch it all happen via livestream.

Nyseth’s office also invites the public to watch a test of the ballot tabulator. She said one resident shows up every time.

“He’s very civic-minded and he’s very invested in the process and democracy and watching it unfold, and this is something that he likes to be a part of every election,” she said.

Election Day will be a long shift for Nyseth. She said she’ll start at 7 a.m. and expects to be there until three or four in the morning.

“We’ll work through until the last ballot is processed through the tabulator and our results are uploaded to the state site,” she explained.

She and her colleagues always find a way to have a good time, though.

“It gets pretty busy, but it’s a lot of laughter and a lot of eating. It’s fun.”

Do you have any election night food traditions?

They usually order in some food and have a potluck of snacks and desserts. One of their regular election workers is famous for her candy bowl.

“It’s kind of like the new trend of candy salads, you know, and everybody brings something and puts it in. She makes the most amazing candy salad, and it’s on the table, and that is the biggest thing,” Nyseth said.

How do you engage with voters and educate them about the voting process?

A big part of Nyseth’s work is interacting with Tillamook County residents and helping them understand how elections work. She recently kicked off a monthly event called “Coffee with a Clerk.”

“Just to sit with the public and talk about what we do in the clerk’s office. Very casual, no agenda, we just sit and visit,” she said.

So far, most people’s questions have been about elections.

“People are getting a lot of information online, on social media, from the news, from their barbershop or their hairdresser. They’re just hearing so much and not necessarily knowing what’s true,” she said. “I want people to look at our office as a place where you can get trusted information.”

She also held election town halls in Tillamook, Manzanita and Pacific City to answer audience questions and share election information, like the life cycle of a ballot.

“From the birth of the ballot until we put it to sleep. From creation, until we certify and then we have to archive that for two years,” she said.

Nyseth has tried to address misinformation at these events — like the idea that election workers change people’s votes. They don’t!

She hopes providing accurate information to voters can have a trickle-down effect.

“Those people are going to hear information that maybe they didn’t know before, but they’re going to be able to go out and they can dispel mis- and disinformation too, because they’ve heard something firsthand directly from our office,” she said.

In a geographically long county that has lots of unincorporated communities and rural areas, it’s been important to do outreach in different places around the area.

“We’ve really tried to be open and transparent and offer opportunities for the public to have access to our office. And I think that lessens the anxiety and the angst that the public may have.”

Do you and other county clerks around the state communicate and support each other?

Nyseth is a member of the Oregon Association of County Clerks, and they ask each other questions or share tips.

“You’ll have random one-off situations that will happen, and we’ll shoot out an email, ‘Hey, this document came in. Has anyone seen this before? Doesn’t it require X, Y, or Z?’ And then everyone around the state will say, ‘Oh yeah, we had this, this is what we do.”

County clerks come from different sorts of professional backgrounds. Some take entry-level jobs in county clerks’ offices out of high school or college and move their way up. She said having peer support has been invaluable.

“You can’t go to school to be a county clerk. It’s not like, I’m going to go to school to be a math teacher. Being a county clerk really is on-the-job training,” she said.

What do you like about working in Tillamook County?

“I was raised here. I graduated from Tillamook High School,” Nyseth said.

The school’s mascot is The Cheesemakers, and she remembered when opposing teams’ fans would show up to sports games with signs reading, “MELT THE CHEESE.” She considers herself “kind of a cheese snob,” and said she used to work for one of the local cheese companies.

She pointed out another former workplace on the drive up Highway 101.

“I used to work at Debbie D’s Sausage Factory up here, the red building on the left. And actually, funny story, my husband and I both worked for her, so that’s where he and I met. We went to different schools, but we met when we were 15, 16, and then both kind of left our lives and we reconnected a few years ago,” she said.

She said she loves how many connections she still has with the people who live here.

“I see so many people that I knew when I was younger,” she said.

She said she also feels grateful for her coworkers in the clerk’s office and other departments of Tillamook County.

“It’s just this great family feeling here at the county.”

What’s the hardest part of your job?

“Having your integrity questioned by people that don’t really know me, but have maybe drawn conclusions based on things — you know, someone is saying, ‘well, all election officials across the country are this way,’” Nyseth said.

She feels passionately about what she does, so this can be tough. But she said not taking things personally is an important skill to learn as a county clerk, along with trying your best to give people grace.

“We are all humans, and humans make mistakes.”

What is your favorite part of your job?

“It’s the people, it’s our public. Sometimes it’s staff and fun things that we’ve done and something funny that may have happened. But mostly it’s the interactions that we get to have at the counter, and it’s seeing my first grade teacher that came in and maybe cast her vote or she needed help with something, and I got to see her and it’s a great memory,” she said.

What do you want people to understand or keep in mind about your job?

Nyseth said that when interacting with county clerks or thinking about their work, she hopes people give them grace and “put on that lens of good intention.”

“Don’t come at it necessarily from that negative spin, but try to turn it and look at, ‘oh, yeah, they’re really actually trying to do the right thing,’” she said.

For anyone worried about an election-related issue, she said the best way to learn more is to keep the lines of communication open.

“We may not agree, but let’s have a conversation and we’ll talk about it. You can trust us and you can trust that we’re following the law. We always do. We follow the law, we follow administrative rule, and we conduct elections as they should be.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/11/01/at-work-with-an-oregon-county-clerk-who-wears-many-hats-to-make-elections-happen/