Rachel Smith, a lawyer-turned-academic who ran Anoka County elections for four years, will take over Hennepin County's elections operation next month.
Smith replaces Michelle DesJardin, who had managed Hennepin's elections for nine years before recently being named co-manager of the county's effort to expand its online offerings. Smith will begin her new job March 15.
Her appointment helps defuse concerns that the state's most populous county had removed an experienced elections chief just as Minnesota enters a year of important races and significant changes in election law.
The Legislature is expected to move up the primary election date by five weeks, placing it in August, to give military service people abroad more time to vote in the general election. Various reforms have been proposed for the state's absentee ballot system, which came under scrutiny during the lengthy U.S. Senate recount between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.
"There are a lot of balls in the air and you want to have the elections department ready for all these changes," said David Schultz, a Hamline University business and public policy professor. "They really have three months or so in terms of getting ready for the primaries."
An excited Smith called her move "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for Hennepin County. I love election administration. It's my passion and it has been for a long time."
As Anoka County's elections manager, Smith was in the eye of the Senate recount storm in November and December 2008. She supervised a hand recount of 182,000 ballots and negotiated with the campaigns on how to handle improperly rejected absentee ballots.
By the time the recount had moved to the courtroom in February 2009, Smith was taking on a new role as program director of the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute's Election Administration Project. For the past year, she has worked with Prof. Larry Jacobs on election issues.
