Cobb County’s new elections director, Tate Fall, jumped from deputy director of the elections department in the smaller, Democratic stronghold of Arlington County, Virginia, to now overseeing the huge operation in Cobb in December — just before the start of what’s expected to be a massively consequential election season for local, state and federal officials.
November ballots in Cobb will feature the U.S. presidential election, four U.S. Congressional races and 20 state lawmaker races. Locally, voters will fill three Cobb County Commission seats, including the chair position; decide four school board races; select seven countywide elected officials; and choose 16 judges in the superior, state and probate courts. They also will consider a potential 30-year Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax transit referendum.
“I feel like I’ve gone from coaching D2 football to coaching the Super Bowl,” Fall said. “We’re expecting a 19-inch ballot in November.”
In 2020, Democrats won a majority on the commission and several countywide seats for the first time in decades, shifting control of the last metro Atlanta county to be considered a Republican stronghold. With the number of races on the ballot, the November election has the potential to again alter the political makeup of county leadership.
Fall, a 29-year-old who said she plans to retire as the county’s election director, said she and her team are confident and prepared to take on the challenge, even with the expected “twists and turns.”
“Once you get in this, you either love it or you don’t,” Fall said. “None of us do it for the clout; we definitely don’t do it for the praise, because we hardly get that, right? And so, we do this because we care.”
Fall graduated from Auburn University in 2018 with a master’s degree in public administration and a graduate certificate in elections administration, which she earned while working in one of two elections-specific programs in the U.S. From there, she worked as a communications specialist at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, created in 2002 to improve the administration of elections. While there in 2020, she said she got a 30,000-foot view of the chaos of that election year across the nation, from an unprecedented, enormous demand for absentee ballots during the pandemic to the recounts and lawsuits that followed the November presidential election.
For the last two years, she was the deputy elections director in Arlington County, Virginia. While that county is smaller and less competitive than Cobb, Fall said working in a smaller department gave her experience with “a little bit of everything, which I felt like helped prepare me to come into a larger office.”
While Cobb County’s Board of Elections had some concerns around her experience level, Fall’s level of knowledge and passion for elections administration appealed to the board, Chairwoman Tori Silas said.
Credit: Jenni Girtman for the AJC
Credit: Jenni Girtman for the AJC
“Tate Fall is highly educated, but even more so highly motivated, and very attuned and enthusiastic about elections,” Silas said. “We wanted to get someone in the office that could bring fresh perspective … She has a certain zeal for it.”
Election workers across the U.S. have faced heightened scrutiny in the last few years in the wake of doubts involving the 2020 election. Despite this, they’ve withstood conservative efforts to disqualify voters, sometimes thousands at a time, and a deluge of criticism from the public and officials.
During the 2022 election year, the Cobb County elections department had several administrative errors, most notably the failure to mail out thousands of absentee ballots that prompted an emergency court hearing to ensure those voters still had the chance to vote. In that same election, the Kennesaw City Council results had to be recertified after staff found a memory card of votes that had not been counted that changed the outcome of the race.
In September 2023, officials announced another 18 ballots from 2022 they had uncovered that had not been counted; while they did not change the outcomes of any races, the error brought renewed scrutiny over the operations of the department.
Staff underwent an audit to determine how to improve processes to ensure errors like these don’t happen again and implemented several procedural changes and checks and balances. Fall was not in Cobb during that time, but she said the errors were most likely a lingering effect of the chaos during the 2020 election, on top of a difficult redistricting process.
“It was just nonstop recounts, another election, another election, a runoff,” Fall said. “So there was never really downtime to look at the system and figure if we were doing things the best way possible.”
Fall said she plans to automate the processes that can be automated, including by using spreadsheets to track ballots, ticking off boxes on a projector for each memory card as it is entered into the system to avoid missing one, and implementing a system where employees can track each absentee ballot all the way through the process.
“What you hear often in elections across the country is, ‘Well, this is how we’ve always done it,’” Fall said. “So I’ve told my team that that’s never an acceptable answer. If that’s the answer, we need to try 10 different things to see if that’s really the best way.”
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
While improving the department’s processes, Fall said she will be “injecting transparency” every step of the way. She plans to host monthly tours open to the public so they can see how the process works with information brochures, and to establish recognizable branding for the department so people can recognize their mail and signage. Fostering transparency and relationships, she said, is the best way to increase the public’s trust in elections. She said she is accustomed to handling scrutiny from the public and doesn’t take it personally.
“I realized they’re here because they care, and I’m here because I care, and that’s what matters,” she said. “I serve all my voters equally. Whether they trust me or not, I serve them. And I want to help build that trust back.”
