Lea is stepping down in a few weeks after 26 years as Chief Registrar and 25 as Elections Director. The offices were combined in 1980. Until then, the Probate Judge was in charge of elections.
Tuesday's General Election will be the last under the watchful eyes of Lea, barring any runoffs which would be held Dec. 5.
She looked back on her career recently and recalled that some polling places were pretty primitive when she took office. "We have gone from using some precincts that had no heat, had no running water, no bathroom facilities to having handicapped access in all our precincts now and using schools and churches and other places that a far more comfortable for our workers and our voters.
Lea remembers that the voting machines that were used in 1980, her first election year as Elections Director, were nothing like the high-tech, sometimes controversial, ones you'll find on Tuesday.
"Those machines," she said, "were the old, huge lever-type machines and those are actually in the Smithsonian Institution now. We have gone from (those machines to the optical scan machines) where you marked a paper ballot and it was placed into a machine that read it to, now, the touch-screen machines."
Lea says she expects the number of registered voters in Hall County to top 100,000 by 2008, when the next General Election, which will include a presidential election, will be held. She notes that when she took office in 1979 there were about 17,000 registered voters and "15 or 16" precincts. Now, there are 74,279 registered voters and 39 precincts, along with absentee voting without giving a special reason, advance voting, and new ways of registering to vote other than visiting the registrar's office.
Lea says the greatest thing about her career has been "all the people I've met, not only locally but from around the country as one of 20 election workers on a federal panel of state election directors." Just last year, Lea was chosen to go to the Ukraine to observe elections in that former Soviet Republic.
As for her retirement years, Lea says "like so many people - travel, rest and enjoy life."
As for her career, she says "it's been an interesting journey and I've enjoyed it all."
http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/11/100831