Derek Bowens has been a nonpartisan election administrator in North Carolina for over a decade. Since 2012, he served in various capacities, including as the director of elections in New Hanover County, North Carolina. In 2017, he became the director of elections in Durham County. Durham County is home to Duke University and North Carolina Central University, a jurisdiction of nearly a quarter of a million registered voters, the fifth largest in the state.
Bowens has been nationally recognized for his work by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the National Association of Counties. In 2020, Durham County won a Clearinghouse Award from the EAC for its innovative app that allowed voters to locate polling places near them, view voting information, and see current polling place wait times.
Additionally, Bowens also sits on the board of directors for the National Association of Election Officials, is a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, and the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions.
Since 2024, he has been part of Issue One’s Faces of Democracy campaign, advocating for protections for election workers and for regular, predictable, and sufficient federal funding of elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?Derek Bowens: I graduated from the University of North Carolina in Wilmington in 2011. Go Seahawks, best school in the UNC system. I was unemployed and looking for work after college and I saw a position on the New Hanover County government's job board for an election specialist. I liked elections and campaigns and my degree was in political science, so I applied and started as an election specialist. I've just been hooked ever since.
Issue One: What part of the election administration story in North Carolina do you think is not told or widely understood enough?
Derek Bowens: The ecosystem of election administration has significantly changed since I first started. When I started, this would have been seen as glorified clerk work, but it has expanded in regards to trust, transparency, and cybersecurity.
There are a lot of things that election officials have to know and do that are specific to North Carolina. The complexities of legislation that gets passed doesn’t always contemplate the workload on election officials—who, in North Carolina, unfortunately, aren’t the highest paid or best resourced by individual counties. The landscape and ecosystem of elections in North Carolina has changed so much since I've started. The state has also transitioned more and more into a swing state, so there's a lot more pressure than there may have been in previous elections. It's already complex in North Carolina. I think we run some of the best elections in the country in terms of process. But, it has become way more complicated, given external factors and actual things that needed to change to make the process better.
Issue One: How many voters are on the rolls in your jurisdiction? What are some of the main challenges that come with being in a jurisdiction of that size?
Derek Bowens: We have about 237,000 registered voters and we're the fifth largest jurisdiction in North Carolina.
Durham County is a county that is very unique politically. It errs on one side on the political spectrum. There's a lot of pressure and visibility into what we do with our elections here because we are a county that could swing an election based on our constituency and their political preferences and leanings.
We also have a very engaged community. They're very invested in elections. Access to the ballot box is very important to them. There are a lot of things in this county that we do, whether that be community outreach or helping folks find the best times during early voting to come and vote. We maximize the number of early voting days in every election that the statute allows. This last election, we implemented a voter experience dashboard where voters could provide us immediate feedback on their experience so we could address potential issues in real time with our election officials.
Our community is really unique and it really is a place where democracy thrives.
Issue One: Durham County is home to Duke University. With such a large student population, can you speak to any programs or initiatives your office has taken to reach this demographic of voters and also any challenges that working with students, who are often highly transient voters, may pose for you?
Derek Bowens: I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we’re also the home of North Carolina Central University (NCCU)—go Eagles—which is a historically Black university. And we are also home to, of course, Duke University. We have great relationships with both schools and work directly on student engagement. We always have early voting sites on our campuses during larger elections, where we know there is more student engagement. NCCU has a polling place on campus and Duke has an Election Day polling place that's essentially right beside campus for student access.
We also engage with many community events. We provide voter registration form resources and information on conducting voter registration drives. Anytime either of the schools need information from us on how to educate their student body for registration, we provide information on best practices.
Some of the challenges with student voters is that they are very transient and don't always know where to go. There’s often a lot of confusion about where a student should register to vote (whether that be their hometown or college town). Students have a lot of things that they're focused on and the vast majority only respond when there's a bigger election.
It is very challenging getting voters to go to the correct polling place and getting college voters or students to register on time. It has its complexities, but we have really good relationships with the schools and we're progressively growing in what we provide to give students the opportunity to access the ballot box.
Issue One: In October 2024, you were featured on NBC News about the physical security updates that you were making in your offices in the face of an increase in threats and harassment towards election officials. The physical security updates included things like bulletproof glass, ballistic doors, and panic buttons.
How did these physical security updates impact your Election Day? What lessons can be learned from choosing to upgrade your physical security in the face of such threats? And how do you believe that funding can play a role, especially when election offices often have to choose between physical security updates and all of the other priorities that they have?
Derek Bowens: We didn't just magically show up with a new building with state-of-the-art security features. This has been a long game.
When I came to Durham in 2017, we immediately began the updates. We immediately began to engage with the county management and commissioners to say, “Hey, we need to be on track to have a consolidated facility.” It took a long time and we moved to different spaces to accommodate our space needs before we got to the point where we could be in this consolidated facility.
The investment was made but we had to develop a chronology of events to tell our story. Looking at things that were happening in other jurisdictions impacted us. Things like threats and fentanyl-laced letters. We had to tell a very compelling story to our commissioners to get them to invest in this new building. They invested $26 million to convert an old Kroger store into a consolidated facility, which included significant funding for those security upgrades.
It was unfortunately easy to make the argument for the security upgrades because we had actual cases of election violence or suggestions of violence that we could share with our commissioners. We moved into this new facility ahead of the 2024 general election, but in the 2024 primary, we actually had an individual show up to a polling place after the polls closed. They were told under North Carolina law that they could not vote because the polls had closed. The individual stated that if they could not vote with a ballot, then they'd vote with a bullet. The individual left and we were able to contact our Office of Emergency Services and deploy law enforcement to monitor the area in the event that individual came back while our officials worked to close down the polling place and return with critical supplies.
That incident spoke to the need for this investment because the ecosystem and the landscape has changed significantly with how people respond to election results and how they think things should be. Previously, it was just regular discourse; it may have gotten intense, but now we have actual cases of people being threatened with harm, intimidated, and people having guns at drop boxes. It's very concerning.
We were able to tell that story and we got everything from bulletproof glass at our front desk, control access doors, cameras all around our facilities, secure access parking, duress buttons, and a separate exhaust system in our mailroom in case there are any hazardous chemicals, mail detection, and ballistic doors.
Our county invested in many things, but it took time and it took a substantial, thought out-story. It took many meetings and petitions with our funders, which are our county boards of commissioners, to have them really buy in. We’re seeing the fruits of it because we had no incidents during the election.
We were able to share that with NBC, but it was a long story and a long process. We're incredibly happy and grateful to our commissioners and also our local board for moving forward with that investment because the threat environment was and remains real.
Issue One: Ahead of the 2024 election, your office launched “DCo Votes,” an app designed to help residents stay informed about and be prepared for upcoming elections with access to crucial information including election dates, sample ballots, voting method options, among other key features. Can you speak to what inspired your office to create this app, its success, and what the rollout of the app was like, such as how you all were able to reach the public with this app?
Derek Bowens: One of my full-time employees had the skill set to develop such an app. I wanted to implement a mobile app that voters could go to see early voting schedules, wait times, and receive notifications from the board of elections.
The vision behind it was that voters shouldn't have to go to a website and navigate through multiple pages. They shouldn't have to depend on their neighbors to give them information or third-party groups, although that is great, we wanted to create a one-stop shop.
It’s our community's trusted source of election information. So, I really wanted to containerize that in an app. It was a way to consolidate information in one place and make it easier for our voters. And it worked out really well.
Issue One: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government does not routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think that the federal government should routinely contribute to some election administration costs?
Derek Bowens: They have a part in why we have elections. We have federal elections in even numbered years where federal law governs the execution of those elections. State law supplements that where federal law does not speak to it. But our most expensive elections are federal elections. And to not have that support seems counterintuitive to the requirement that we have to execute these elections under federal law.
Funding has not been where it needs to be. We've gotten HAVA grants and HAVA sub-grants through our state elections authority. We know that's not consistent and we know it's not significant. As election officials, we really have to begin to think about employing strategies on how we can convince our localities and states to provide us more direct funding where they can. We should continue to make efforts for an increase in federal funding, but the environment may not produce a positive outcome, so we can look into more efforts on how we can help all of our election authorities in our states. We should employ strategies within their governing structure to more local funding to pick up gaps and to fill the gap of the federal government. We know that there are basic mandates in most jurisdictions to provide for localities, provide funding for the execution of elections. But meeting those baseline legal needs definitely is not enough and we need to fill those gaps.
We'd love the federal government to do it, but I think we need to think about strategies and the ways that people can tell stories, true stories, based on facts and experience that could be compelling, to localities that hold the purse strings, to fill some funding gaps.
Issue One: Could you discuss the price tag of running an election in your jurisdiction and where would you say that funding primarily comes from? If you had any extra funding or an unlimited amount of funding, how would you spend some of that?
Derek Bowens: In this fiscal year, our budget in Durham was a little over $3 million. That was to execute the 2024 statewide general election. I'm glad to say that our commissioners typically give us 10% of our budget requests. That's tied to proper storytelling and also discussing what the outcome could be if you don't provide this funding.
If I had a bunch of surplus funding, I would pay my workers more. That would be top priority. We would definitely increase pay for our frontline defenders of democracy. That includes our temporary poll workers, our hundreds of temporary employees, and our permanent staff. They stand diligent in the face of danger, real danger, not possible or suspected or purported danger, real danger. And so my first priority would be to fund them.
I think number two on that list would be to increase enhanced technology wherever we can to produce more innovative solutions.
Issue One: In recent years, election related misconceptions, conspiracy theories, and lies have proliferated. Can you speak to how this has impacted you and your office’s daily work?
Derek Bowens: Our workload with regards to public records requests and general public nonsensical inquiries, that are just in no way based in fact, has unfortunately increased.
Having investments in security measures has really come as a result of actual things that have happened to election officials across this country that are life threatening. Again, not speculation, these are realities. So it's had an adverse effect.
I think it's also had some positive effect in that it shows the transparency, readiness, and versatility of election officials. It also shows our persistence. We're not going to back down when it comes to preserving the United States of America, preserving this democracy and system, our republic established by our Founding Fathers.
I often say that when elections gets in your blood, it's fighting for your family. You're not going to stop because I don't think you can do more impactful work than this without elections.
Elections are the baseline for governance, for taxes, for the distribution of funds. They are critical. Our ecosystem has 100% changed from when I first started to how we operate now. That's why election officials should be paid significantly more. We have to be cybersecurity experts and logistics managers. We have to know public records law and how to respond to public records, what's confidential, what's not, how to manage access control. There are so many things that we have to control because of false narratives. Again, most of it is not based in reality. It has been harmful, but it has shown the resiliency and persistence of election officials and defending our great democracy.
Issue One: Given what you and many election administrators across the country have faced, what inspires you to stay in this line of work?
Derek Bowens: Elections are the bedrock of who we are as a country, without this democratic form of elections and governance, where would we be?
I think for me, I have to be in it. It's not an option; we have to preserve democracy. I have a seven year old and I think about her when I do this work, what world do I want her to have years from now when she turns 18 and she's eligible to vote? I want her to be able to go in just like I do now, and vote a ballot that is free. I hope she has more access to the ballot box than I have today.
I think about my forefathers in my lineage who fought for the right to the ballot box. We are one bill away, one, strong perspective away, or majority perspective away from not having that. This is not guaranteed. It's something we have to fight for. I see that in my work, I see that when I look at my daughter.
I think for me, it's critical to preserve democracy, to continue to operate in this amazing experience that is the United States of America. And it's in my blood. I don't think I could ever leave this work.
Issue One: Outside of running safe and secure elections, what are your hobbies and what is a fun fact that most people might not know about you?
Derek Bowens: I think most people know this about me: I like eating. Anything that is not American food, I'm a huge fan of. I love my wife and my daughter very much. Glory to God. I also love spending time with my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I enjoy spending time in church and doing things in my community. I also like golf. I am a huge Tiger Woods fan.
Issue One: What is your favorite book or movie?
Derek Bowens: I would say my favorite book is probably “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini. I love his books, including “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” The Bible also is one of my favorite books. As for movies, I love “Love & Basketball” and “Legends of the Fall.”
Issue One: Which historical figure would you most like the opportunity to meet?
Derek Bowens: Jesus, would be one, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, and Shirley Chisholm.
Editor’s note: More than 10,000 officials across the country run U.S. elections. This interview is part of a series highlighting the election heroes who are the faces of democracy.
Amelia Minkin is a research associate at Issue One.
Angelina Clapp is the campaign manager for the Election Protection team at Issue One.
