Board OKs new positions for elections department

Absentee, registration office will be split into two divisions.

Cobb County’s new elec- tions 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 divisions with their own man- agers, creating a full-time GIS analyst position to work with electoral maps and hiring a communications spe- cialist focused on voter out- reach and education.

Currently, one manager oversees all of the absen- tee voting, advanced vot- ing 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 vot- ing, 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 bal- lot is correctly coded under each electoral map in the county — a role the depart- ment 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 redistrict- ing. 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 dif- ficult to hire a qualified ana- lyst 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 edu- cation outreach is an area that we need to improve on,” Fall said in an inter- view with The Atlanta Jour- nal-Constitution. “And the reason we haven’t been I think as successful in the past is we don’t have a fulltime 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.