JAMES CITY–Dianna Moorman started her career working for an airline handling customer complaints. When she applied for a job in the James City County Elections Office she was asked if she thought she could handle angry voters.
“I handled telling 300 people that the flight was overbooked by 50 and late by five hours and no one was going to make their connection,” said Moorman. She didn’t think she’d have any problem.
Still, she could not have anticipated how challenging the environment has become for election staff in the past three years. Or how changes in voting procedure would make it election day hundreds of times a year, with primaries, runoffs, absentee ballots, mail-in ballots, early voting, same-day registration, and, yes, actual Election Day itself.
“People think we work two days a year,” said Moorman, who rose through the office ranks to become the boss, director of Elections and Registrar. “The reality is we won’t really get a break until Christmas. Not this Christmas. Christmas 2024.”
Though talking down unhappy airline passengers turned out to be good preparation, she and her staff could not have anticipated the heightened level of vitriol that has been directed at them since the runup to the 2020 presidential election. Moorman herself has received 29 intimidating phone calls, her home address was published online, and she has occasionally felt the need for a police escort from office to home.
“These people who think there’s something fishy going on, I challenge them to come work one election with us, see how we do training, how we handle security,” Moorman said. “Make your decision after that.”
Transparency, she said, guides the way her office works.
“The more that the public understands what we do, the better for us,” she said.
Election officials are under attack throughout the country and in Virginia, where registrars have already been removed in at least four jurisdictions.
A national poll conducted in 2022 by the non-profit Brennan Center for Justice found one in six election officials had received a threat related to their job. More than one in four had concerns about being assaulted on the job, according to the poll results.
The increased scrutiny of election administration is driven by several factors, including the change in the party affiliation of Virginia’s governor. By law, local electoral boards are entitled to majority control by the party of the governor. Many changes are being made this year as registrars’ four-year terms expire this summer.
Not in James City County, though, where Moorman was just reappointed to another four-year term, beginning July 1. Electoral Board members Perry DePue, Curt Stoldt, and Dorothea E. Matthews praised her service, saying “Moorman has served with dedication, knowledge, and purpose, ensuring that our elections are honest and fair and are perceived to be so by our voters. She has navigated through the difficult last four years where the election laws were changed significantly.”
She also navigated through this: late last October, after feeling faint at home, and losing her vision, she was diagnosed with a “complete separation of the vertebral artery,” a life-threatening condition which, once diagnosed, required immediate brain surgery.
The midterm elections were November 8.
“They ran an entire election without me,” she said. “Richmond sent someone to help out but everybody here knew their marching orders. If ever there’s a test of what we’re doing here, that was it.”
Now as Moorman and her staff of four gear up for what is shaping up to be another hectic two years of voting, she must also contend with redistricting, which has changed polling precincts for about 20 percent of the electorate, and the need to incorporate what seems like never-ending changes to voting laws. In 2021 alone, the state legislature enacted 59 new election laws. Moorman keeps the current election code book on her desk, beribboned with rainbow-colored sticky notes. She refers to it all the time. (It has grown from a 50-page document when she started to a 550-page book now.)
“Laws go into effect every July, which means there are always changes that we need to work with,” she said. “When (legislators) change the laws, we have to change every packet.”
It used to be that voters had to have a reason to get an absentee ballot.
“Now they can opt to have one sent to them automatically every election,” Moorman said. Prior to the pandemic, her office processed roughly 800 absentee ballots during a presidential election. For the 2020 election, they received 9,000.
When she started in 2005, the elections office had a $300,000 budget. It’s now $1.1 million a year.
James City County is a sprawling area, with five distinct precincts and 19 polling places. Moorman said the number of registered voters is close to 65,000, and along with Williamsburg and York County, voters here consistently register in the top ten of turnout statewide.
Though she takes her right to vote seriously (and the office holds a little celebration for people who come in to vote for the first time), she does not vote in primaries, which would require her to reveal a party affiliation.
“I don’t want to be perceived as favoring one party or the other,” she said. “I truly do treat everybody the same. There is no preferential treatment.”
In-person early voting for the November election begins September 22.
Meanwhile, in other election-related news, in Williamsburg, Tina Reitzel also won reappointment as the director of Elections and General Registrar. The city’s Electoral Board reappointed her to a four-year term beginning July 1.
“The Electoral Board has unanimously and enthusiastically appointed Tina Reitzel for providing outstanding service to the residents of the city during an especially demanding time,” Electoral Board Members Pam Legere, Margaret Driscoll, and Tom Mainor said in a statement.
In 2020, weeks after the pandemic reached the Williamsburg area, the city’s Voter Registrar’s Office organized drive-thru voting at the fire station for the City Council and June primary elections. The effort earned the city a 2021 Innovation Award from the Virginia Municipal League.