Cobb County’s new elections director, Tate Fall, has begun restructuring her department, starting with three new positions the Board of Commissioners approved this month.
Fall, who began her role in December, is splitting the absentee and registration department into two separate divisions with their own managers, creating a full-time GIS analyst position to work with electoral maps, and hiring a communications specialist focused on voter outreach and education.
Currently, one manager oversees all of the absentee voting, advanced voting and voter registration processes, which Fall said is too much for one person to oversee properly, especially during major elections. The new role, absentee division manager, will oversee all of absentee and advanced voting, and the salary will be just under $64,000. The registration department will be under its own manager.
The GIS analyst will be in charge of implementing redistricting changes in the system to ensure each ballot is correctly coded under each electoral map in the county — a role the department desperately needs in order to implement district maps that have changed due to litigation, Fall said.
“With the part-time GIS Analyst position being vacant, we have barely met our legal requirements to create and post updated maps with the help of an analyst on loan from another department,” Fall wrote in the request to the board.
During the 2022 elections, the department had several blunders, one of which involved incorrect ballot coding after redistricting. Some voters received the wrong ballots during advanced voting, affecting the school board Post 4 race and the Mableton cityhood ballot question. The errors were quickly corrected, and a minimal number of voters were impacted.
The department’s part-time GIS analyst position has been vacant since 2022, Fall said, so the position needs to be full-time since it is difficult to hire a qualified analyst to do work part-time. They will make just under $47,000 a year.
The third position, a communications specialist, will oversee voter outreach and education. The role currently falls under the poll worker manager, who is usually too busy managing poll workers to do much voter outreach, particularly during elections, Fall said. This position’s salary would be just under $49,000.
“I think that voter education outreach is an area that we need to improve on,” Fall said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And the reason we haven’t been I think as successful in the past is we don’t have a full-time person that’s dedicated to doing that.”
The Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 to approve the three new positions, with Commissioner Keli Gambrill in opposition. She has previously said she cannot support approving new positions outside of the budget cycle.
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