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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. It's MHP, and we're back again with our special series Down Ballot, where we're looking at all those races that are not at the top of the ticket but make a big difference in our lives. Today, we're taking a look at county clerks. It's an elected position in 26 states, and it's an important job.

Brianna Lennon: It really varies according to what state you're in, but by and large, county clerks are in charge of elections administration. That's obviously what most people are going to interact with the office for.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is--

Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I'm the county clerk for Boone County, Missouri. We also do a variety of things from issuing liquor licenses to maintaining the official county records to doing payroll for the county. It's an incredibly important job. It's very administrative bureaucratic, which is why a lot of people have not heard of us before.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, after the 2020 election and the false claims of election fraud by former President Trump and his supporters, county clerks, and many of the election workers who work with them found themselves targeted by threats and harassment. I asked Brianna to talk to me about the job, its challenges, and what partisanship has to do with being a county clerk.

Brianna Lennon: I think it's a vestige of how county government was set up where you wanted to have checks and balances, and the best way to do that was with political party. I can say from talking to colleagues and from being at gatherings of election officials, very few of us know each other's political party and even people that come into the field, at least in the past, that were very close to their partisanship, got away from it as they started to run elections and see that there really isn't a Republican or a Democratic way to order ballots or buy envelopes or design forms.

There's only so many things that you have control over, and a lot of it is run on a nonpartisan level. What I do think that is important, though, is to find out what the stance that a election authority has on voter-centric models of things, which sometimes can be partisan, but oftentimes is not.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think it's a really important point. There are some roles for which a D or an R is going to give me a really good signal as a voter about how that person is going to perform in that role, or at least how they're going to try to. Since this is a skill-oriented role, if I'm a voter and the D and the R don't tell me that much, what are some of the things I should know about the qualifications, the capacities, and the worldview of my candidates for county clerk?

Brianna Lennon: I think you're really going to want to look at their resume to see if they have a history of being in positions that do require responsibility and digging into different jobs. You don't want somebody that has only ever held policy positions. You want people that have real-world experience of working with other people, having to meet deadlines, knowing how to organize things efficiently, and can really get things done. You want a record of being able to accomplish things.

You don't want somebody that's just going to tell you, "Oh, I really believe that we should support everybody that wants to vote and they don't have a plan for how to do that." It's a job that requires know-how and you're going to want to find out from your election authority what their plan is for implementing some things that you've heard at the state or the national level to see if they've really thought about it.

For example, we have a new photo ID law that's going into effect in Missouri. There's various ways to implement that. There's ways that you need to train your election judges, and then there's things that we have some discretion over that can really help voters. We can do more voter education, we can do more outreach efforts. If you have a county clerk that's not interested in creating social media profiles or talking to the press, then you're not going to get that level of voter support that you need from them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: These are obviously fairly complex things to know. You started with, "Oh, I'd look at their resume," so talk to me, you're running unopposed in this cycle, but when someone is running, what does a campaign for a county clerk look like?

Brianna Lennon: Lots of times the campaign is really education about the office itself. Very few voters have ever needed to know exactly what the county clerk's offices do. For example, when I ran in 2018, I literally just ran an education campaign. I did Friday fact videos about things that the office actually did to let people know that I had experience in elections management, but also that I knew what the job was.

Lots of times people running for local offices think that they know what the positions do because maybe they've interacted with a small fraction of what the office interacts with people for, but they don't know the whole job description. It's really important. You're never going to have somebody that knows 100% of it unless they're somebody that already works in the office.

Oftentimes, there are people that work in the office that then want to just get promoted to the next level. Sometimes you have people that are running because they have a personal reason to not like the person that's in that position. They got denied a business license or they didn't like the way a budget was written.

If that's the case, you really need to dig into whether they have the skills to be able to execute the rest of the job. Some of that you can find out really just from talking to the person that's running and getting from them why they're running in the first place.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just how important is this role in this moment given the attacks on our democracy, not just ideologically or partisanship, but really on how our democracy functions?

Brianna Lennon: I think as voters, when they're looking at these broad, lofty concepts of voting rights or democracy, all of it depends on how it really gets implemented at the local level. If you have a county clerk that's not interested in opening up the office on the weekends, even though they can, then you're going to lose some of the ability to exercise your right to vote.

The discretion that we have in our offices is huge. People forget when we talk about things like poll taxes and when we talk about things like infringements on civil rights in the 1960s, it was the county clerk's offices that actually had to implement those laws.

Nothing that happens in elections is ever done by the state necessarily. It's done at the local level by county clerks. If we're talking about making sure that we have elections that are secure, that we have people that are committed to running elections well and maintaining our democracy, then you have to start at the county clerk level, because if we don't have people that are literally keeping polling places open and processing voter registrations, then all of the state laws and federal laws in the world are not going to help if you have someone that just closes the office early or has absolutely no interest in running it well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Last question for you. You're also a podcast host. You host High Turnout Wide Margins with the public radio station in Columbia, Missouri. You talk with other local administrators, what are they telling you on high turnout wide margins about what they're facing heading into these midterms?

Brianna Lennon: It's really been so fascinating to talk to people, especially in high-profile states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, California. Those are the states that local elections administrators are really dealing with some brand new problems that I don't think any of us really expected after the 2020 election. They're getting physical assaults in their offices now. They're having to hire additional security. They have threats that they've had to report to the FBI.

For a job that was relatively unknown and also is so administrative and really when it's done right is not a very controversial thing. It's been really jarring, I think, for a lot of elections administrators that have been doing this job for 10, 20 years and do it because they love it, do it because they enjoy the challenges of trying to figure out better ways to run elections and better ways to serve voters that are now coming under attack for doing their job.

I think we're all still trying to figure out what that means for the future of elections administration. Everybody right now, whether they're in California, whether they're in Missouri, is really looking to 2024 and wondering what's going to happen.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Aren't we indeed? Brianna Lennon is Boone County, Missouri county clerk and co-host of High Turnout Wide Margins Podcast. Brianna, thank you so much for taking the time.

Brianna Lennon: Thanks so much, Melissa, for having me.

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