10 FEBRUARY 23-MARCH 1, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | would be like, “Oh, God, I really didn’t sign up for this.” So we tried to protect people from what was ultimately really, really sad. What are some developments that you think are worth sharing? Despite all of this, I hired 700 election judges this past November. In this past elec- tion, there were 700 people who were willing to come forward and help. Both by law and intentionally, they’re of different political af- fi liations. So I had 700 people from across the political spectrum who knew there are risks in this realm, who are staffi ng vote centers that anyone can walk into, and who are working at our ballot processing facility. We’re a large swing county. They know that puts targets on you, and they were raising their hands to do the work. That gives me hope. And the coolest thing to see is, at every single table, a D is sitting next to an R. At every single vote center, you’ve got people who — you know, in the early days, they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs — are forced to talk to people of different political affi liations for nine hours at a time. And it’s amazing to watch. People of different political affi liations are laughing together, they have brought in baked goods for each other, they are asking about how a kid’s music performance went, or how a sports game went. They care about each other. And when they come back for the next election, it’s like watching people on the fi rst day of sleepaway camp, with these friends they haven’t seen in ten months. They’re hugging and catching up and they couldn’t be more thrilled. We are creating this every year and proving there is still the ability to get along, to be neighbors with people, even when you don’t agree with them on everything. The divisiveness is part of the national rhetoric, but it is really on the fringe. Most people just care about having a functioning democracy where we all get a voice. And it leaves me, as someone who has to hear the absolute worst from the fringe, to see this incredible example of democracy at its best, of people signing up to work with people of different affi liations to make our democracy function. I’m left with net hope for the future; that’s what inspires me and others. I tell those 700, go tell all your friends and neighbors about what you experienced so we spread this hope. I think the positive message is what’s been missing from the news. Exactly. During this past election, we would dig into our website traffi c, where we have pages of information on election security, answering all the questions and debunking all the misinformation. And then pages on how you register to vote, where is your voting location. In some cases, the traffi c was twenty to one in favor of the how- to-vote pages. On the security page, there wasn’t much traffi c — people didn’t really care about that. What they cared about was how to vote. They cared about fi nding their voting location, they cared about turning in the ballot. But the media coverage, every interview request I got, was about election security. This is the point: The coverage is not matching the reality. And look, it’s a sexier story that two years ago, a sitting president tried to overthrow the results of the election to stay in power. I get that. But at the end of the day, what most people were asking our offi ce about was, how do I vote? They would say, “I trust this process. I don’t care about the conspiracy theories or your responses. I care about: How do I cast my ballot so I can participate?” What kinds of mistakes do people make? The biggest mistake in our system is wait- ing until the last minute. It’s much easier if you don’t procrastinate. We mail ballots all over, to Iraq and Af- ghanistan. Students might go to college out of state, but they consider Colorado their primary residence, not the dorm room, and we’ll mail them ballots. You can register to vote up until 7 p.m. on election night, but you have to do it in person if it is less than eight days out. So voting becomes harder the longer you wait. Vote centers are boring places for the fi rst two weeks that they’re open. But then come Monday, and then re- ally come Tuesday [Election Day], and they are hopping. So don’t wait till the end if you don’t want to stand in line. Come anytime in the two weeks before, and you’ll have it to yourselves. What else do people do wrong? People will forget to sign, or they’ll sign their spouse’s envelope. Take the signature seriously. People don’t think we’re check- ing it. They think it’s like, you know, sign- ing a credit-card pad, which no one really scrutinizes anymore. We check every single signature. Sign like you signed the last few times. If you sign the ballot on the steering wheel of your car and it’s a terrible signature, it will get rejected. Our process lets you ad- dress that, up to eight days after, but that’s another step. Don’t make yourself have to go through another step. Your successor was just sworn in. How does the next clerk get ready for the job? The clerks’ association is very good about trainings. We get sworn in during odd years, so there isn’t an election until November in most counties, so you have time to learn. It’s harder in the smaller counties, but in a county like Jeffco, I had just over a hundred employees, and only two of them left with me. So there’s a ton of institutional knowl- edge in that building. Do you favor having elected clerks or ap- pointed clerks? It’s a very good question. When I was fi rst running, and early in my time in offi ce, I agreed with many people who said, “Isn’t this crazy that we are electing nonpartisan election offi - cials, and because of the cycle we do them in, we run partisan?” You know, I had a D by my name, and most of my colleagues who ran had Rs by their names. And I think electing a nonpartisan clerk in a partisan race is silly. But the reverse argument, which I think holds a lot of merit, is that the way to have the most accountability is to have the person directly accountable to the people. Having a layer of elected offi cials or bureaucrats in between the voters and the clerk would make the clerks accountable primarily to someone who might ultimately be on the ballot, which you never want. I think ultimately, by being elected, I was fully independent. I did not report to the commissioners. I did not report to the secretary of state. I reported to the voters. It would be a problem if I reported to three elected county commissioners whose elections I had to oversee. That would worsen a perception problem that exists. The concern many have is this hypotheti- cal concern that you’re putting partisan peo- ple in offi ce. And if people were appointed, you could appoint independents or what- ever. I will say from personal experience at all levels of government, fi rst, appointees are rarely apolitical. They are sometimes even more political than elected offi cials. But sec- ond, the vast, vast, vast majority of clerks do not do the job in a political way. Some of my closest friends are my Republican colleagues who are clerks. I am inspired by many of them. I consider them heroes for the ways they’ve been standing up to things in the last few years. We are examples of nonpartisan- ship. We try to be nonpartisan in a way that’s good for the offi ce itself. But being elected lets us stay accountable to the people rather than to some offi cial who might try to force us to do things in a certain way. Why didn’t you want to run again? No easy answer. A lot of it was the feel- ing that I had campaigned on doing a set of things four years ago, and we did them. I had accomplished what I had set out to do. I think we dramatically improved, and I worry that if I did four more years, I would get stale. It was better to let someone new come in, with new ideas. Also, my wife and I had two kids while I was in offi ce, and that just changed the pace of life and what I’m looking for out of my career at this moment. That was a big part of it. Do you have a vision for your future? I will certainly be in public service again at some point in my career. I have a desire to serve. But I loved the private sector while I was in it, so my next role might be private sector. If I can fi nd interesting work that offers hard problems to solve with good people, that’s what fi lls my cup. But I envision being back in the public sector sometime in the next two to ten years, because this is where I get most fi lled up: by the impact of the public sector. There’s an old Methodist saying, “Do all the good you can for all the people you can for as long as you can.” And that’s ultimately what I want to do. I want to have as much impact as I can. I’ve added to that, in the last two years, a caveat: “...while also prioritizing your family and making sure you’re being a great and present dad and husband.” And that’s important to me. I have one more question. Why did you want to fi ght fi res while also being clerk? I continue literal fi refi ghting today. Golden is a combination fi re department, where we have both volunteers and career staff. Most rural communities are all volunteer, while most cities have all career departments. It’s often in the suburbs, in that urban-rural di- vide, where you get these combination de- partments. In Golden, we were exclusively volunteer as recently as ten years ago, and then we started transitioning by hiring some career people to be on duty at all times. But we don’t have enough of them to get a rig out the door, so we have to have volunteers to supplement. I started doing that before I was in offi ce, and because it’s a volunteer position, I could continue it while I was in offi ce, and I’m continuing it after. It’s my favorite thing I do. Why is that? As I’ve said, what I get fi lled up by is solv- ing hard problems with good people. I mean, we speed around the city solving problems. I pinch myself every time we roll out of the bay on the rig. Let’s see if we’ve gotten a call while we’ve been sitting here. Yes, at 1:56 we did get a call. So once I leave, I will turn my pager on, and if we get a small call that this shift crew can handle, I don’t do a thing. But if we get a bigger call, I’ll respond to the station and be on the second rig that goes out of the bay. Honestly, it couldn’t have been a better thing. My fellow fi refi ghters, we range in politics from the far right to the far left. We range in income. And we have all kinds of professions: We’ve got career fi refi ghters, law enforcement, teachers, engineers, at- torneys and elected offi cials. It’s such a cool cross-section. Good elected offi cials try to fi nd people who will stand up to them. My fellow fi refi ghters are happy to give me a ribbing any day of the week. Email the author at [email protected]. George Stern continued from page 8 After one term in offi ce, George Stern has moved out of the Jeffco clerk’s offi ce and back into private life. EVAN SEMÓN
