Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen, who can be retiring after 32 years of service, poses for a portrait in her workplace on the Salt Lake County Authorities Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022. Kristin Murphy, Deseret Information
Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen, proper, works with Salt Lake County elections supervisor Laura Jacobs, heart, and Salt Lake County election director Michelle Blue, left, on planning and mapping in-person voting areas on the Salt Lake County Authorities Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022. Kristin Murphy, Deseret Information
Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen, who can be retiring after 32 years of service, poses for a portrait by a poll sorting machine on the Salt Lake County Authorities Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022. Kristin Murphy, Deseret Information
This previous March, when the deadline for submitting to run for reelection got here and went and Sherrie Swensen didn’t submit her title, she completed one thing nobody else had ever been capable of do: vote her out of workplace.
The longest serving Salt Lake County clerk in historical past determined eight phrases and 32 years was sufficient.
Just like the ’72 Dolphins, she’s going out undefeated, abandoning a legacy as arguably the best recruiter of voters in state historical past. She’s had different duties, too, like overseeing passports and marriage licensing (she’s personally carried out nicely in extra of 1,000 marriages), however her legend is working tirelessly to verify elections are open to every body. Nobody’s drummed up the vote like Sherrie.
* * *
Rising up, turning into the GOAT of voter turnout wasn’t on her imaginative and prescient board. She didn’t actually have a imaginative and prescient board. She was raised by working-class mother and father within the working class a part of Murray. Her father, Sterling, was a home painter, her mom, Ethel, a secretary. When she graduated from Murray Excessive College, class of ’66, she graduated straight into the workforce. A succession of workplace and actual property jobs led fairly by happenstance to a secretarial place with the Utah Democratic Occasion.
There, her effectivity and vitality caught the attention of occasion officers, who urged her to run for county clerk. She demurred at first, not being naturally drawn to politics, however all that modified when she realized how comparatively troublesome it was to register to vote.
“Mainly it (voting registration) was form of a well-kept secret,” she says, remembering again to a pre-internet time when paper registration types might be discovered behind the desk on the most important put up workplace, obtainable on request, and that was about it.
Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen, proper, works with Salt Lake County elections supervisor Laura Jacobs, heart, and Salt Lake County election director Michelle Blue, left, on planning and mapping in-person voting areas on the Salt Lake County Authorities Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022.
Kristin Murphy, Deseret Information
“I simply thought that a democracy meant that extra folks ought to be consultant of the plenty of the inhabitants,” she recollects. “I assumed that was vital.”
So in 1990 she ran, and received. Barely. In 1994 she ran and received. Once more barely. However alongside the best way increasingly more folks turned conscious of what she was doing. Within the six elections since, she’s received comfortably. Within the 2020 election she commanded two-thirds of the vote.
What she was doing was making registration as accessible to as many citizens as she presumably might. She toured the county, inserting containers of registration types in grocery shops, condo buildings, all put up workplaces, libraries, faculty campuses, wherever she might consider. She went to excessive faculties and signed up 18 yr olds. She went to senior citizen facilities and signed up 81 yr olds. Within the 1992 election, the primary main election of her clerkship, the variety of registered voters elevated dramatically.
She was an early proponent of mail-in voting. She promoted a everlasting vote-by-mail registry that was so profitable the Utah Legislature adopted swimsuit and made mail-in voting a statewide possibility beginning in 2015.
As she prepares to retire — she’ll supervise yet one more main election in November earlier than she formally steps down on Jan. 1, 2023 — figuring out the highs of her job is simple: watching folks vote. “To see the pleasure in folks to have their voices heard.”
The lows? The costs of voter fraud, nationally and to some extent regionally, emanating from the 2020 election.
The allegations by Donald Trump, the previous president, and his acolytes that the 2020 presidential election was rigged — in all of the swing states that mattered — leaves her all however apoplectic.
To Sherrie, and to her colleagues across the nation who know a factor or two about how elections work, it’s akin to folks saying we didn’t land a person on the moon.
“I can’t think about how many individuals must have conspired for the fraud they’re suggesting to have taken place,” she says. “And what number of must hold quiet. In fact somebody would crack. It makes completely no sense. The concept of getting all these bogus ballots being inserted into our system printed in somebody’s lounge or coming in from China is completely ridiculous. The diploma of problem is bodily unattainable with the encryption and protections within the software program.
“And so they’re saying the fraud was solely in his (Trump’s) race. I don’t know the way they might do it in order that one contest can be skewed and the others be legitimate. I can’t even fathom how that might occur.
“It's all so insulting and disheartening, and simply unsuitable.”
Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen, who can be retiring after 32 years of service, poses for a portrait by a poll sorting machine on the Salt Lake County Authorities Middle in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022.
Kristin Murphy, Deseret Information
The challenges to the system had been virtually sufficient to trigger her to run for one more 4 years — so she might proceed to guard and defend a pillar of democracy she loves dearly.
However she’d be 78 on the finish of a ninth time period.
“It was actually onerous deciding (to not run once more) as a result of now greater than ever we want individuals who have the belief and know the system,” she says. “However all of us need to age, and it acquired to some extent the place I assumed, ‘It’s time.’”
What’s on the horizon come Jan. 2? She lists spending extra time along with her two sons and eight grandchildren, plans for journey and getting round to tasks which have been lengthy uncared for.
That’s what she says on the report. Off the report? “I’ll in all probability be bored stiff,” she laughs. “I imply significantly, I’m afraid I’ll be bored as a result of for thus lengthy it’s been so time-consuming and so rewarding.
“I liked the job, I simply saved working and working,” she says. “It looks as if eight years, not eight phrases, it’s gone so quick. Simply taking a look at all the pieces, you form of pinch your self a bit of bit. It was by no means some grand plan. I might have by no means imagined all of it occurring.”