Alissia Northrup and I pass through a room with multiple computers at parade rest and I recognize it at once, though it looks different from down here. It’s the room where the County Clerk and Registrar of Voters, Alissia, and her staff tally the votes each election night. I’m used to the perspective of the web stream, somewhere up near the margin of wall and ceiling; passing through the room at this angle feels funny, like being backstage, a kind of liminal sense that isn’t dispelled by the familiar anonymity of the conference room we enter.
Alissia settles in a seat at the large table and I join her with my digital recorder. She has a message for Del Norte County voters. It’s written on the small piece of paper she’s holding. “I just want to tell the voters of Del Norte…” she begins. “You want me to do it now?”
Before I can answer, one of Alissia’s staff ducks a head in from behind the door. She presents a mangled mail-in ballot. “This person would like a replacement ballot,” the woman chuckles and holds the ballot up for Alissia’s official inspection. The end has been punctured repeatedly and perhaps slobbered on. “Her dog ate it.”
“No fibbin’ on this one, huh?” Alissia laughs and leaves me to go replace the ballot. I look around the blank laminate room. The last time I was in this room I was with Jessica Cejnar-Andrews. We were interviewing Dr. Rehwaldt about why we all had to start shaking hands with our elbows. Funny how time works.
“Sorry about that.” Alissia reappears, having successfully dealt with the canine ballot tampering, and picks up the thread of a thought she’d begun expressing on the phone earlier. “I have this…” she tells me, allowing her pause and matter-of-fact shrug to speak for her. “…for young people voting. I like to get young people volunteering at the polls. It’s good for them, but it’s good for us, it’s good for the community, seeing young people at the polls. I’ve had people say it gives them hope.”
Alissa and her staff are readying themselves for the November 5th election, lining up volunteers, poll workers and watchers, making sure we voters are registered and balloted and ready to put our collective shoulder to the boulder of Democracy, give it another little shove up the hill. But these days it seems there are more and different concerns on top of the ordinary nuts-n-bolts ones inherent in making a Del Norte Election Day happen. Misinformation. Negativity. Lies freely told that shake the public’s confidence in the very processes underpinning our society. And young people, Alissia says, are especially in danger of losing hope.
“I think they see so much and hear so much negativity, y’know? Elections didn’t used to be like this. Now there’s so much anger, so much hostility, and I just think that young people pick that up and think that’s what elections and voting are all about? They think, ‘I don’t want to be a part of all that.’”
As a county election official, Alissia is dead-center in all that. “I was listening to a podcast, they said that most people ten years ago didn’t even know what election officials did,” she says, a touch of disbelief – or maybe it’s nostalgia – in her voice. “Now election officials have become the enemy. It’s so negative,” she says with what I now clearly recognize as disbelief. “We’re in on all this somehow.”
Alissia is in her third term as County Clerk. In her time in office, she’s seen the political spectrum shift, the pendulum swing, to be sure. But these days are different. Old dichotomies have folded in on themselves and totally new tensions have arisen. What was once a perennial push-pull between ideologies has become a shouting match over the very workings of our Democracy. It’s no longer that the other side is voting wrong, we now question the efficacy of voting at all.
Regardless of the reality of any of this, in these days of Stop the Steal and billion dollar defamation suits, life has gotten much more difficult for county election officials all over the country.
“It makes me sad,” Alissia says. “I do love this, I love the job, I love the process, I know the process works. It just makes me sad there are so many people that are buying into that, just willing to take what they’re hearing and be so disillusioned and disappointed with their country and with the system, because I think we have a system that works, I think it’s probably the best system in the world.”
For Alissia, the remedy is obvious, and unsurprising coming from someone who works every day in that little unremarkable strip of civic real estate where rubber and road meet. “We can’t have blind trust for everything, but get involved and know the process yourself, not from somebody else’s point of view, or what you hear on TV. Really get involved and ask questions, be involved in the process, work at the polls, volunteer, be a poll watcher. Something like that, where you’re part of the process and see what happens.”
For young people, it’s the same message: “Get involved. Vote. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re too young or you don’t know enough, because you do know. And what you don’t know, research it, talk to people from both sides, someone you might not necessarily agree with.”
Talking with her son, in his twenties now, has taught Alissia how to do this, how to accept another person’s validity while disagreeing with their views. The trick, she says, is to listen, like really listen.
“I think so many times with young people we just think we know more than them. We listen to respond. We don’t really listen to hear what they say. I think if we really just listened to them, we’d probably learn some things. They’re living a different time than we did. Everything is different. And we get stuck in our own mindsets. Sometimes you just have to step outside that and be willing to listen…everybody just wants to be heard and respected…if we would all just take the time to listen to each other, I can’t even imagine what we would learn or what we could do.”
Alissia slips on her reading glasses and focuses on the slip of paper she’s holding, the reason I’m here, her message for Del Norte voters. I’d forgotten. I’d gotten lost in just chatting with Alissia. For me, she’s a fixture here, in the Flynn. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I mean, she personally has become part of the collective face of our community. Alissia’s one of those elected officials that’s just always there – there are several in our county and city government – showing up every day to do a competent job, a human job, in the service of the community, of all of us. To a person, I’ve found them approachable and warm. I don’t know what it is, what gene you need to be someone like Alissia, but I’m grateful they exist.
She clears her throat and looks up at me, eyebrows raised over the rims of her glasses. I nod silently back, and she says:
“Hi, I’m Alissia Northrup, Registrar of Voters for Del Norte County. I just want to let the voters of Del Norte County know how important your vote is. I know we are all hearing that our vote doesn’t matter or make a difference, so why bother? I’m here to tell you that your vote DOES matter. And never let anyone tell you otherwise. Whether you vote early, you vote by mail, or you vote at the polls on Election Day, just make sure you vote on November 5th.”
She takes direction well, stopping after a stumble, restarting the sentence with the same inflection. Beautiful. We get what we need in no time at all.
It’s a remarkable time to be in Alissia’s position. It can even be unhealthy. As we gather up, moving toward the conclusion of our conversation, Alissia tells me of another county clerk she knows, a woman named Cathy who had to resign her office in Shasta County for health reasons. The stress of dealing with a hostile county board – the accusations and vitriol that became commonplace – led to heart issues. There’s a CalMatters article on Cathy’s plight. (https://calmatters.org/politics/2024/06/shasta-county-election-administration/)
Of course, the vitriol – the violence, even – isn’t relegated to embattled election officials or far-right county boards. Recently, a woman in her 70s was struck in the head with an apple thrown from a passing car at a Harris-Walz rally in Brookings. To the south, students in Humboldt are occupying campus buildings and marching on supermarkets because of hummus. It’s tough out there.
But if you look at a map of this political unrest, the fault lines creasing the social topography of our region, Del Norte sort of stands out. Granted, you have to squint, and you need to remember that what you see is being refracted through various lenses: privilege, history, ethnicity, income, collective trauma, etc. But, compared to the political strife you can find in some surrounding communities, our strife is relatively civil, meted out in Public Comments or Guest Columns. And we seem to be content arguing about things like the Tri-Agency or the Harbor, not about whichever Future of Our Democracy is currently making a cameo on cable news.
I suppose there are many reasons for this, but for me, it all boils down to our remoteness – the many ways the rest of the world can seem far away. We can decry our lack of shopping malls or nightclubs or urologists, how every generation has to grow up and mostly leave, but the takeaway is that we are all in this place together. Just us. In a community where your sworn political enemy could end up standing next to you in the checkout at Walmart, we’re more apt to leave people to their own devices, take them at their word.
Alissia understands all this about Dell Norte, appreciates the privilege of living here. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m pretty lucky here,” she tells me as we make our way back through the computer room. “There’s a few…there’s nothing…for the most part…” She smiles at me as she searches for the right phrase. “I feel like I get support from both sides, and that people really wish me well, and wish us well, and trust us. That means a lot to me, that somebody puts their trust in us. I see other places where (election officials) are being accused of things…it takes a huge part of your heart and your soul to do this. It’s not a job. You’ve got to have a real love for it.”
The election is November 5th. Alissia and her staff will be up late that night tallying the votes from the 18 or so polling places located across Del Norte. I, like many of us, will be watching on the livestream, refreshing the feed for the latest numbers; and not once will I worry that the numbers are fake. Alissia has given us all her word.
