Cascade County Commissioners voted unanimously to appoint Devereaux Biddick as the new election administrator during their Dec. 22 meeting.

Biddick has been working in the elections office this year as a county employee and will receive a 15 percent increase on her salary for the additional duties.

She’ll assume the role immediately while commissioners finalize the job description to post and go through their formal hiring process.

County officials continuing discussion on moving election duties

Several people spoke during the meeting supporting the appointment of Biddick though some asked commissioners again to rescind their Dec. 12 resolution removing election duties from the clerk and recorder’s office and moving them into a newly created election administrator staff position under the commission.

Commissioner Rae Grulkowski said that she wanted more time to review the draft job descriptions.

Commissioner Joe Briggs said they’ve had the drafts for two weeks and needed to move on.

County officials discussing elections operations after removing duties from clerk’s office

Grulkowski said she’d just received a draft the morning of the meeting and wanted to discuss either the interim or permanent job descriptions.

Carey Ann Haight, chief deputy county attorney for civil, said that the job description they’d received the morning of the meeting for the interim position was the same as they’d been given previously that had been vetted by legal and human resources staff.

“It’s not new, it’s what you were given before, so what is the issue with that,” Haight asked Grulkowski.

Grulkowski said they hadn’t gone through the job description for the permanent position, to which Haight asked why.

Grulkowski said they hadn’t had the meetings to talk about it.

County Commission votes to strip election duties from clerk and recorder’s office

The Dec. 22 meeting was the third meeting commissioners held to specifically discuss appointing an election administrator.

Commissioner Joe Briggs said that he was fine discussing Grulkowski’s concerns with the draft job description and they made some minor revisions.

Grulkowski had asked that Sandra Merchant be involved in developing the job description but was out of town this week and didn’t participate in the Dec. 19 meeting.

Later in the meeting, Grulkowski said she was bothered by the apparent annoyance of others in the meeting for her wanting to go through the job description.

County meeting on proposal to remove election duties from clerk and recorder’s office moved to Expo Park

Biddick will assume the election administrator role immediately and commissioners said they’d contact IT to change her access levels so she can handle timecards and payroll for elections staff.

The position will be the equivalent of a department head and commissioners said she’d participate in those department head meetings.

Commissioners did not indicate when they’d open the permanent position or an anticipated timeline for making that hire.

Briggs proposes removing election duties from county clerk’s office

In 2022, Biddick signed a petition asking commissioners to:

• ban all electronic voting equipment, excluding Automark machines
• voting be allowed with valid identification only
• ban mail-in ballots except for overseas, military, disabled or other qualified persons
• ballot turn in on election day only, with one day counting
• create smaller precincts for voting and counting
• clean voter rolls by requiring all qualified county residents to reregister

Former county election staff told The Electric earlier this year that county officials had to kick Biddick out of the election count board in November 2022l because she was recording the count machine and tech when he was working on the machine, in violation of the rules that prohibit phones and after signing an agreement that she would follow those rules.