SE4E2: Elections Make the Heart Grow Fonder: A Conversation with Georgia’s Akyn and Noah Beck

Noah and Akyn Beck

In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with married election officials Akyn and Noah Beck in Georgia. Akyn is the Elections Supervisor in Floyd County, and husband Noah is the Elections Director in neighboring Polk County.

They spoke about how the couple met and fell in love – over poll books and precinct population data, and about how they have seen the landscape of Georgia election administration change in the last few years.

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Noah Beck: She’s a phenomenon. She is wonderful at what she does, and yeah, I thought she was cute and I thought she was great at the conference and whatnot, but I knew where I was at, I knew that I was in deep without a paddle, you know?

And so, I had been on, like she said, I’d been on the job for a week, and I sat there that first day and I realized that my little voter registration activities in my political days was not what we were doing. It was much harder, much more complicated, and I had a primary to run in May – just two or three months out, and so I needed help, and so, I’m not saying I used her, but, she and I were on the phone just about every day.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Eric Fey: Welcome back to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I am Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri. I’m here with my co-host –

Brianna Lennon: This is Brianna Lennon. I’m the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.

Eric Fey: And today we have some special Valentine’s Day guests. So guys, you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Akyn Beck: I’m Akyn Beck. I’m the Director of [Elections in] Floyd County in Georgia,

Noah Beck: And I am Noah Beck. I am the Director of Elections for Polk County, Georgia, just south of Floyd County.

Eric Fey: So, I’m not sure if there is any other example of neighboring, married election officials anywhere in the United States. It’s a great story, but before we get into that – would you each be willing to share how you got involved in elections in the first place?

Akyn Beck: Yeah, I’ve been in for 10 years now. I started off as a poll worker at 16 years old, probably going on 11 years now.

Noah Beck: Yeah, that’s probably about right.

Akyn Beck: But my grandma worked in an elections office, and they were needing poll workers, as all of us do, and so, I took a day off of high school to be a poll worker, and I’ve just stayed in it.

Noah Beck: Yeah, she got the bug.

I’m a little bit different. I grew up in the area, and I studied political science and communications in school, and then thought I wanted to do politics. That was a horrible idea – went awfully and then I left the field all together and went into mental health comms. And then the job came up in Polk County in about 2022, early 2022, and I knew I wanted to do public service, but I knew I didn’t want to do politics. I wanted to be somewhere in the area, and so, it just kind of – the stars aligned, and I got the job in March of 2022 here in Polk County, and I didn’t know anything. Didn’t know what I was doing. I thought I did because I came from politics, but I had to learn the hard way.

Luckily, I met a pretty, smart, also young elections director at White County, at the time, White County, Georgia, that helped me along the way.

Eric Fey: It’s interesting to me when, especially, you know, when you got involved in elections. I mean, since 2020, Georgia has been in the limelight, so to speak, of election administration and a lot of your colleagues around the state, you know, have – how should we say it? They’ve been thrust into the limelight, as well. In ways that many of them probably would not wish upon others. Were you aware of that dynamic, what was going on, and knew you might be put in a similar situation?

Noah Beck: Yeah, unfortunately, like all too aware. That’s actually why I left the political sphere. So, I worked in state politics up until November started to play out in 2020, and I got invited to stay on until the January runoff – we had those big Senate runoffs in January of ‘21 and I agreed to it – and I really wish that I hadn’t, and it just kept getting uglier and uglier and nastier and nastier. And I just remember thinking to myself, like, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” I knew how the parties were treating election officials, local election officials – my focus was in EI. It was communications and EI for “election integrity” for one of the parties. And I just, it rubbed me the wrong way.

And so, I thought that I was just gonna be done with it forever, and so, I was like, I got into this, I knew I wanted to do something in the public service sphere, and so, that’s how I found mental health comms, because I’m a communication generalist by trade, and so, I knew I wanted to kind of get as far away as I could, try to help as many people as I could. And so, I went and did that for a long time, but I missed it, but I saw how we were treating people. I just couldn’t be a part of that.

And so, I knew what it was like. I had been on the other end. I was in the room when they said that absentee ballots, the thickness of the paper, was causing them to scan multiple or to not scan several absentee ballots at a time in Georgia, and that’s when I just kind of had to, like, roll my eyes and be like, “Golly. It’s just a,” you know, “this isn’t about, you know, putting the candidate up, trying to explain to people that they’re the best choice, and earning people’s vote anymore.” It was just so ugly in post-November into December, during the recounts – so ugly on the politics side, I was like, “Ah, I can’t do this ever again.” Meanwhile, Akyn was one of the people being harassed, you know, she was on the other side. We were on different sides of Georgia at the time, thank God, or I’m not, like, my colleagues might have been mean to her, but different sides of Georgia. But yeah, it just, it got ugly, and I knew what it was, and I was really conflicting about it, so I ended up skedaddling, ended up leaving

Brianna Lennon: So Akyn, I think one of the things that we hear a lot of is about how elections administration is sometimes like an accidental field, and it sounds like that is not necessarily true for you, that you really liked it when you were a poll worker and kind of kept in the field. I’m wondering what drew you to it and what’s been keeping you to it, especially considering what Noah just said about how terrible the 2020 election went, and you’re still wanting to do it, as well, just like, you know, down and committed for it.

Akyn Beck: When I was working as a poll worker, I was ignorant of the election process because I was 16, I’d never cast a ballot before, but what was really jarring is, as I was working in the polls, the voters were also ignorant of the election process. So, having to be 16 leading people who should know what’s happening into what a primary means and why you have to pick your ballot style in a primary –it really just motivated me that there was a gap of information that people have actually no idea what is happening and they should.

And so, I don’t like being ignorant of things, so I poured myself into learning as much as I possibly could and helping other people learn in an understandable, digestible way. And then, I’m in so deep now, you know, I’m pretty niched in. I don’t really know where else I would go, but I really do, I enjoy voter education. I enjoy making the election process as seamless and as enjoyable to the voters as possible, and so, I don’t foresee myself going anywhere, but I did choose it, and I’m glad I did.

Brianna Lennon: One of the things I wanted to touch on real quick – especially since Noah said that you had been in different places, is you both have hired positions, correct? They’re not, they’re appointed positions? Has that informed kind of the way that you do things, like, what motivated you to go to different counties and things like that? Was it just like progression of career, or are there other things that kind of play into it?

Akyn Beck: So, a little bit of both. I started off in Jackson County, Georgia, where I was a poll worker because that’s where I lived. I was too young to move out on my own. When I did move, I went to college in Dahlonega, which is North Georgia, and the director that I worked for in Jackson County went to Hall County, and so, she had an availability. I loved working for her, so I followed her to Hall County.

2020 happened. It was insane. I was actually pregnant with my daughter at the time, and I wanted to progress. There was a lot of people who made mistakes in 2020. There was a lot of places that needed good directorship, and White County became available, which is up in north Georgia, and I took a job at White County while we were doing redistricting. And so, during the redistricting process – it’s long, you’re fixing a lot of mistakes that are 20+ years old, and I did it quickly, and I did it right. I made friends at the Secretary of State’s office, and I really wanted to learn more and really make an impact on the election field.

So, I went to work for the Secretary of State’s office Election Division as a regional training liaison. So, I was helping other election directors understand their role, as well. And then, while I was there, one of my counties that I was a liaison for kept calling me about questions that I was concerned that they didn’t know the answer to. And I dove a little bit deeper into it, and I realized they had an interim director, their board had just gotten dissolved, and they got a brand new board. Their current interim director was a previous chair of their board that was just stepping in because he was just trying to keep the boat afloat, and they needed someone, really badly so. And I started off this career with a passion for the electorate. It was going to be hard. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew that I was gonna have to start from the ground up, but their electorate deserved it, and their county deserved it. So, I took a chance, and I went to Floyd County. I don’t know if you’ve googled Floyd County in 2020, but there were some issues, for sure, and it’s been amazing that, you know, start from the ground up in Floyd County and build something that I think my staff in the county can be proud of.

Noah Beck: There was also a cute guy in northwest –

Akyn Beck: – there was also a cute guy in northwest Georgia that I had to uproot my life for, you know?

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Eric Fey: So, you’ve alluded to it – tell us the story. How did you guys meet and how did we get to where we are now?

Akyn Beck: So, that time in White County, we went to what was called GAVREO [Georgia. Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials], which is our state conference every year. I was, it was my first directorship. I was, at the time, the youngest election director of the State of Georgia, and I went to the conference, and my old board chair from Hall County came up to me and said, “You know, I don’t think you’re the youngest election director anymore, but there’s a young man here who needs help, and you need to help him.” And so, he introduced us, and he’s like, “This is Noah from Polk County.” I lied and said I knew exactly where Polk County was. I didn’t. And I told him that I would help you – no judgment. I’ll answer your dumb questions because there are a lot of questions that seem dumb to people who have been doing this for 20+ years, but you would have, otherwise, no idea.

Noah Beck: And I had no idea.

Akyn Beck: It was, like, his second week on the job, and he was at GAVREO and it’s an overwhelming experience to somebody who’s been doing this for 10 years and is a trainer at GAVREO, so I gave him my number, I added him on Instagram – there’s not many people in the election field with active Instagrams – and then, it started from there.

Noah Beck: And not too long after that, she became my liaison. She was at, she left White – I met her when she was at White County – but she left and went on to the Secretary of State’s office after that, and then she was helping Floyd County a lot more than she was helping me, with much scarier problems than she was having to help me with, and they’re my neighbors to the direct north. We share a border. That’s where I went to college – Barry college is in Floyd County. And so, it was, you know, she was working in the area a whole lot, plus a lot of what some people call like the heavy hitters of Georgia, or in northwest Georgia, anyways, and so, that’s where Akyn belonged.

She’ll be really modest about it, but I say all the time that Akyn is probably one of five people in the entire state that could have fixed Floyd County, and I think she’s probably the only one with a tough enough skin to deal with some of the stuff that that she has to deal with there because election denialism is still alive and well in Georgia, and she really, really takes, you know, a heavy brunt of that. Her community has a lot of election denialism in it, and so, having the skill set to fix the problems of the county that’s losing ballots left and right, that’s not properly processing some ballots, that, you know, have to have their board dissolved by new authorities just granted to the state election board.

She is, she’s a phenomenon. She is wonderful at what she does, and yeah, I thought she was cute, I thought she was great at the conference and whatnot, but I knew where I was at, I knew that I was in deep without a paddle, you know, and so, I had been on, actually, I had been on the job for a week, and I sat through that first conference day – I think we met on the second or third day – and I sat through that first day, and I realized that my little voter registration activities in my political days was not what we were doing. It was much harder, much more complicated, and I had a primary to run in May – just two or three months out, and so I needed help, and so, I’m not saying I used her, but she and I were on the phone just about every day.

And there was a couple of others that helped me along the way – Nancy Boren of Muscogee County, I was lucky enough to sit next to her that first conference day, and I must have looked wide eyed to her, because, I mean, I was just like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know up and down, like, what are they talking about? It’s like they’re speaking to me in a different language.” And I met a lot of good people along the way – Didn’t marry any of them, but this one.

But it’s been a great road. The May primary went off without a hitch. I just literally would plagiarize every single thing Akyn did in Floyd County and it worked like a charm. And then she, of course, became our training liaison. She had a lot more time for me to kind of copy off of her, and once you got to Floyd County, a lot of times, it doesn’t translate from Floyd County to Polk County because they got some big picture stuff going on up there, and we’re just a little peon on the compare, but, yeah, the rest is history, as they say.

We welcomed a son into the world, so we’re a party of five. We’ve got a one-year-old who’s turning one next week, and so, we’re a little elections family, hopefully raising a couple of poll workers in there, you know, with the shortages.

Laughter

Brianna Lennon: So, one of the things that – and since you mentioned mental health too – I’m really curious about, you know, so many people talk about their lack of work-life balance and trying to figure out how to leave their work at work, and you both are bringing it home with you. How does that work? Because, I mean, I think Eric and I are in similar situations – both of our partners are nowhere near elections, they have no interest in ever working in elections, which sometimes makes it easier, because, you know, you can commiserate, and they’re not trying to be like, “Oh, this is what’s happening with my elections office.” But have you found that to be helpful, like, to have commiseration at home? Or has it been hard to kind of keep the boundary?

Noah Beck: The hardest part, really is, like, the self control on my side, because, like I said, she’s got a lot of – we call them fans. She’s got a lot of fans out there that like to think about her a whole lot, and I dealt with a lot with my election deniers early on, and they accepted what I put out in front of them, and they were willing to work with me and think critically about things.

Akyn’s are – I call them a different, like, breed. They’re just genuinely a different breed, and so, when I see the way that they talk about her, they post about her, or the meetings that they’re holding about her. It’s really hard for me to maintain a level head and see her get treated that way and be cool about it. But that really is, like, the only thing that bothers me at home is that I wish I could deal with this, but Akyn’s just as capable, much more capable than I am. She’s more than qualified to handle, you know, her situation. It just drives me up a wall that I can’t go and, you know, kick doors in and, you know, ask people to do better, be better citizens, think more critically. But – it may be news to me. Akyn may turn around and say, like, “No. It literally drives me crazy. This poor kid won’t stop asking me how to do this job every day of his life.”

Akyn Beck: No, I enjoy it. I think any negative of it would be, is – if I’m confused about something and I ask him a question, and he gives me an answer that I was also thinking, I have to give a second thought to say is that just, is he just regurgitating information to me that I gave him first? Like we need an outside, objective opinion, because I think I told him that, and so we, of course, we’re going to be on the same page because I’m the one who told him that information.

Noah Beck: And, you know, I’ll check around, but like, if you know Joe tells me something from XYZ County, I don’t know Joe that well. This one, I’m, like, legally binded to, I trust her, like, she’s dependent on my paycheck all the same, like, she wants me to do good at my job. I don’t know what Joe’s motives are. So, I trust Akyn’s word a whole lot, and so, I’ll tell ya – 95% of my knowledge base is what Akyn has guaranteed me as the correct way to do things.

Eric Fey: All right. So, serious question. Just hearing your answer there, Noah – I have to think, Akyn, do you ever mess with Noah in some way? You plant the seed of something you know will make it hard for him to do something, just to mess with him a little bit, because I bet – it sounds like at the big at the beginning – I bet you suspected there were days that Noah called you with problems that he was just making up that weren’t really going on. He just wanted an excuse to give you a call. So, I wonder if you try to get him back ever?

Akyn Beck: We pride ourselves in the state of Georgia being first reporting our initial results. I started off that trend because Floyd County was always reporting their absentee ballots at one o’clock in the morning, which is insane. So, I started off trying to be the first in the state reporting. Well, we’re competitive, so Noah started to try to be the first in the state reporting, and he’s beat me a few times. I want him to succeed in all things, and I don’t ever want to sabotage him until that night – unfortunately, you’re on your own. When it comes to election night reporting, that initial report, I do want him to struggle a little bit for that because I like to win. So, that would be the only time – I’ve never misled him during that time, but I don’t think it would be beneath me to do.

Noah Beck: And I don’t think she’s like, we’re like, misleading each other when it comes to election night reporting. We’re just not sending the typical reminders.

Akyn Beck: Yeah, I’m not just, I’m not going to throw you –

Noah Beck – report formatting that you have to do to get the report out of your election management server. I’m not, just not reminding her, like, “Hey, make sure you have your precinct population data in.”

Akyn Beck: And his server room is so much closer.

Noah Beck: That’s her issue.

Akyn Beck: It’s so much closer to his actual computer, and we report so fast, it genuinely is down to step count, like, we’re so quick that the distance between your server room and your computer, the type of USB you use makes a difference.

Eric Fey: So, I just, in the last couple days, I was at a meeting, I was talking to Zach Manifold from – what’s he from Gwinnett County? And somebody at the table asked him, you know, “How are things going in Georgia? What do you think?” And one of the things he mentioned was that the turnover has lessened, and one of the points he made was that really, the people getting into elections now – especially at the director level in Georgia – are folks who want to be there, like, they understand what they’re getting into, and you two seem to really fit that mold exactly of what he was saying. And so, I’m wondering if you both have seen that same thing throughout Georgia? What is the dynamic now? Do you think Georgia election administrators have now kind of come out on the other end of all this controversy, and are we on a better path?

Noah Beck: I think I’m seeing my colleagues stick around a little more than when I very first got here. It was almost – 2022 was, we were gearing up for the first big elections after the 2020 mess when I first got here, and it really was like a whole bunch of vacancies. People that I met once at that conference, and then, you know, went out to pasture. They were done, washing their hands of elections and stuff like that, changing careers. I actually am the fifth election director in 10 years when I started at Polk County. Turnover is super bad here, and so, I’ve been here now for three years, three? Yeah. Three years, and I’ll be here for a lot longer than that. And so, I think that it’s stabilizing – from being a newcomer’s perspective.

Akyn is one of the ones that actually weathered 2020 though, and it’s not as many as you would think. After 2020, you know, a lot of the people that I dealt with on the political side are just gone, you know, and some of them, like, had to delete their LinkedIns and stuff like that too, because it was so bad. But to me, it looks like it stabilized a whole lot.

Akyn Beck: I think if you weather 2020 and it wasn’t the most negative, absolute, horrible experience your entire life – I think we all got thicker skin than we did before 2020. I think it also was a big motivating factor of, “How can we do this better? How can we do this more transparently, more efficiently? How can we be a resource to our poll workers and our other staff members so they don’t feel like they’re left out to dry on Election Day?” And I think that we all learned a lot from 2020 and we all became better, or we decided that this was not for us, which is also a valid response to 2020. But I think those of us that weathered 2020 and are here now, I think as horrible as it is to say – I think we’re all better for it.

Brianna Lennon: You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Brianna Lennon alongside Eric Fey. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.