There was a problem in the mail room. It was ballot mailing day in Clackamas County, but only a few hundred ballots had been printed — for a precinct with several thousand registered voters.
For Tiffany Clark and her team, it was time to problem-solve. They spent the day printing thousands of ballots themselves, getting them into envelopes, and delivering them to the post office. By the end, all the ballots went out on schedule.
Clark is an election worker at the Clackamas County Clerk’s office, and a proud member of the Clackamas County Employees Association (CCEA). If you have voted in a local, state, or federal election in Clackamas County, Clark probably helped count your vote.
“I have the longest job description in Clackamas County,” Clark said. “I am not kidding.”
She’s not. Someone needs to change their voter registration? Clark can do that. Someone wants their home to be annexed into a new district? She can do that too. Storing past ballots to comply with federal law? That’s Clark. Filing to run for a county-wide office? Go see Clark. Designing ballots? Clark. Checking signatures? You guessed it; Clark.
“I love what I do,” she said. “I don’t have a job, I have a career.”
Clark was born in Salem, Oregon, and moved with her family to Clackamas County in 1987. As a little girl, Clark’s favorite store was JK Gill, a stationary store in Clackamas Town Center. “I’d make (my mom) buy me forms and receipts and calculators,” she recalled. Clark wanted to be a travel agent as a child, and she would spend her time creating fake travel itineraries for her parents. “I loved math, I loved spreadsheets,” Clark said, “my mom thought I was crazy.”
Clark’s mother, a nurse, instilled in Clark and her older brother the importance of helping others. Clark’s father worked in warehouses and was a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “It didn’t matter where we went,” Clark said, “my dad could always find a job with that union … they would take care of him.”
Once when she was a child, Clark’s father went on strike.
“I didn’t really understand it,” she recalled, “I just knew that dad was able to take me to school … and that we were eating a lot more macaroni and cheese and hotdogs than normal.”
She could tell that the strike was important to her father, and her parents taught her the significance of solidarity.
“We don’t cross the picket line,” Clark said, “I’ve drilled that into my kids.”
Clark’s first job was a union gig as a cake decorator at Safeway. She worked at Wells Fargo, and then at various mortgage companies before the housing crash. In 2007, she applied for an opening in the Clackamas County Clerk’s office and was hired in the records division.
She enjoyed working in the records department, but it was a quiet office, mostly people “doing their own thing,” Clark remembered. Then, in the fall of 2008, the Clerk’s office asked Clark if she would be willing to help with the presidential election. “Why not?” She said, “I’ll go learn something new.”
Clark arrived at the office at 7 a.m. on election day. She didn’t leave until 4 a.m. the next morning. Even then, she only went home long enough to shower, nap, and be back at work from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. that night.
“[I was] kind of doing everything,” Clark recalled. She started out front, helping with registration and issuing ballots to voters. After voting closed, and the ballots were sorted, she moved over to help with signature verification, making sure that the signatures on ballots matched those in the voter files. After that, she ended up in the tally room, helping with the final count.
“It was a lot,” Clark remembered, “the adrenaline … I get goosebumps talking about it.” Dozens of people, working late into the night to ensure that every vote was counted correctly, it was intoxicating. “I didn’t look back,” Clark said, “I loved it … I love election day.”
There are many things Clark loves about elections: the problem-solving, the frenzy, the teamwork. Still, for Clark, it’s about more than that. “It’s not about who’s elected or who’s not,” she said, “it’s more just making sure that the voters’ voices are heard.”
Clark and her team process ballots from across the county and around the world. When one of her sons, a member of the Army National Guard, was stationed in East Africa, she helped count his absentee ballot. In 2012, she helped an astronaut vote from space. Clark has worked on every presidential election since 2008. Even when she left the Clerk’s office for a few years, she would take time off to work on election day.
It hasn’t always been easy. Clark returned to her full-time role as an elections analyst in 2019. The next year, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she and her co-workers spent a few weeks working from home before returning to the office in May of 2020 to organize the primary elections.
It was an uncertain time. Clark learned that other in-person county employees were receiving hazard pay, but she and her colleagues hadn’t gotten any. So, she reached out to the CCEA. “The union really had my back,” Clark said, and soon enough, she and her coworkers were receiving the compensation they deserved.
Throughout her time working in elections, Clark says the operation hasn’t changed much. “It’s still the same process, we’ve just fine tuned it and made it better,” she said. “We’ve gotten a little more technology, but we’ve also gotten a lot more transparent.”
Despite this, Clark knows the public’s relationship to elections has changed.
“It was very different back [in 2008],” she said, “because people trusted us.”
Clark wishes more people would stop by on election day.
“We have one of the best observation areas in the state,” she said, “it’s open to the public.”
It’s not an idle invitation.
“If you have questions … we’ll talk to you,” Clark said. “We will explain exactly what’s going on, from step A to Z…. Please, please come see me. I want you to. I want you to watch me work.”
