The Marshfield Square is a fairly busy place during the week. Several businesses surround the Webster County Courthouse, including at least four law offices, and many of the parking spaces are occupied.
A friendly guard greeted me as I walked into the courthouse and said that Webster County Clerk Stanley Whitehurst was expecting me.
Whitehurst has held this position for 26 years – he began the job on January 1, 1999 and has been elected a total of seven times. He faced an opponent only twice.
A vintage sign with the words county clerk and an arrow points the way to his office where we talked about the election process.
Whitehurst said each election follows a process laid out by state statute.
"For instance, if you look at an April election, which is your local school boards and fire districts and cities, the process for that will actually start in late November the year prior," he said. "We'll send letters to the districts that have positions open, reminding them of their filing requirements and then we just follow kind of a time schedule, kind of a printed checklist as the days get closer."
They’re already well down the checklist of things to do ahead of the November 5 General Election, according to Whitehurst. One thing that was still left to do was recruiting election judges, which he said isn’t difficult.
"We have a really good crew, and they're people that we lean on, you know, time and time again," he said. "And we do have a bipartisan balance in every polling location, so equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans."
Having representatives from each major party at every site, according to Whitehurst, is key to a successful election.
"It creates an atmosphere where you don't even think about partisanship," he said. "It calms everyone's nerves down and also, you know, in terms of there being a conspiracy, you're not going to get four people to keep a secret."
Election judges go through training, which covers rules and regulations among other things, before each election. For many, Whitehurst said, it’s accumulated knowledge.
"We go over things and then we add two at each time, and we use a lot of the same people, and so some institutional knowledge gets passed from team to team," he said. "But, basically, you start with Missouri law and then you talk about just practical ins and outs, and you just build it up over time."
As Whitehurst said, every polling location must have an equal number of judges from each party (there are 12 polling sites in Webster County besides the courthouse). In a rural area, it can be a bit more difficult to find that equal number — and to find people who have the time to serve and who aren’t related to any opposed candidates. But Whitehurst said he always finds enough judges.
As elections near, he’s also in charge of making sure voting equipment works correctly.
There were baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election. Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. were sued by Dominion Voting Systems over false reports about fraudulent equipment. That resulted in Dominion reaching a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News in April 2023.
Whitehurst said state statute lays out the process for checking voting equipment.
"We have a public test date set early in the process where we basically take a test deck of marked ballots and then feed them through every machine and make sure that, one, that it's operating the way it should and that the results are accurate," he said.
After an election is over and unofficial results are in, county clerks across Missouri conduct post-election audits. They’re another step in the process of ensuring a fair and accurate election.
"The Friday morning after the election, we have a bipartisan team come in, one from each party," he said, "we randomly select a precinct. We do a hand count of some of the races on that ballot and then we take the additional step of running those same ballots through the machine a second time and then make sure that the results from election night match the machine counts from Friday and also the hand count from Friday."
Those audits are open to anyone who wants to watch.
Whitehurst encourages anyone with questions to call his office, and people have. After the last presidential election, he said, several Webster County residents contacted him, "and we invited them to come into the office," he said. "And I can think of three people in particular that had concerns, and so we asked them to come into the office. We actually invited them to come to election judge training. Two of them decided to try their hand and become election judges. One of them is now a supervisor and does a great job so I would try that approach again. I think we need to be open to the public and let them see."
They’ll have more than 100 people assisting with the November 5 Election, he said. That goes a long way towards helping people see what the process is really like – not what they might have heard.
"Well, that's 100 different families, and that word kind of gets back out through the community through that network," he said, "and when people get in and they're sitting side by side with someone of the opposite political faith, and they get to know each other, they get to trust each other, they see the steps that are going, I think that reinforces support for the overall process, and that is really a beneficial thing."
Whitehurst said he hasn’t been the target of any threats as some election officials have since the 2020 Presidential Election. He believes that’s the result of being in a small town where many people know and trust him.
David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research told NPR recently that, this year, harassment of election officials could be worse. Whitehurst said he isn’t too concerned. He said there will always be those who are unhappy – that’s just how it is when you enforce rules. But he assures people that his office does things by the book and that they’re welcome to watch the process.
Still, he’s quick to admit there’s no such thing as a perfect election.
"When you look overall, you know, there's going to be some some blemish somewhere," he said. "There'll be a machine that doesn't fire up or some power outage some(where), you know, and there needs to be a little bit of patience and tolerance for that type of thing. The process will hold because there are processes in place to deal with all those issues, but I think it's damaging when some minor thing will crop up and everyone rushes to the conclusion at the end that it was nefarious or that it's a major crisis that can't be solved. Democracy is a little messy, and people are people, so perfection is not an attainable goal, but we strive."
He said if people will have "a little bit of forgiveness and good humor, the system works a lot better."
