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Q&A with Kate Springer, from St. Louis County Board of Elections
Kate Springer, a Public Information Coordinator on the St. Louis County Board of Elections, speaks below about the board’s preparation for the 2024 election. The board has 230 voting locations across the county and an average of 10 to 12 poll staffers per location.
The following article was edited for clarity. This interview was conducted on the evening of Nov. 5, two hours after polls closed in Missouri.
Student Life: Tell me about the county board’s process leading up to election day.
Kate Springer: Leading up to the election, we are choosing the polling locations, and we’re staffing the polls to make sure we have poll workers at all of our locations. Then, we have to get all the supplies that go to our locations, like ballot stock, printers, toner. There’s also the technology portion of it: making sure all registered voters are listed in our database, and those kinds of things.
SL: How do you think the election went today?
KS: The weather kind of threw us a bit of a curveball with the flooding. We knew obviously it was going to rain overnight, but I don’t think anyone expected the widespread flooding that there was across the region. So we had some issues with poll workers getting to their locations, some minor flooding, and power outages, but we were able to still open on time, which I think is a big testament to our staff. We also were able to pivot when it came to power outages because we have people ready to go if something like that happened, so we were able to send generators and keep voting going on even when we had some issues.
SL: What was your reaction to the county turnout as a whole?
KS: We had a really big turnout for early voting, and we had pretty good turnout in our unofficial county-wide turnouts, which was about 76.76%. It’s pretty on par with what we’ve seen for the past two presidential elections — we expected that it was going to be about 75%. I think we did a pretty good job anticipating that, staffing up, and having supplies ready to handle that.
SL: How are you feeling now?
KS: We’re still pretty busy here. Tonight, we will tally the unofficial results, but we won’t certify for another week or so. We also always do an audit afterwards, which involves a random selection of 5% of the precinct, and then hand-counting those. So we still have a lot of work ahead. The election is not over for us yet.
SL: What would you say to people feeling anxious about how long it might take to figure out the results of the election?
KS: In St. Louis county, accuracy is number one for us, and so speed is not a number one priority. It’s all about accuracy and making sure that everything is done fairly. We should have the unofficial results tonight, and we work really hard to make that happen.