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.
Dave Bjerke, the nonpartisan Director of Elections and General Registrar of Voters in the City of Falls Church, VA, has been working in elections in Northern Virginia, just miles from the nation’s capital, for nearly 20 years.
His election career started in Fairfax County, VA, the most populous county in the state of Virginia, with nearly 800,000 active registered voters. As an Election Specialist, he oversaw the county’s voting system, election equipment, and polling places.
Bjerke has now been serving the population of voters of Falls Church for over 16 years. The city is unlike many others — it is one of 41 independent cities in the nation that governs itself and is not a part of any county. Although the city is just about two square miles in area and is considered the smallest county-equivalent municipality in the United States, it has an active and engaged voter population of about 12,000 voters.
In addition to his work in Falls Church, Dave Bjerke is a Certified Elections Registration Administrator (CERA) program graduate and has co-chaired the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) Election Officials Liaison Committee, the Voter Registrar’s Association of Virginia (VRAV) Region 5, and has served on the VRAV legislative committee for over a decade.
Bjerke spends much of his (limited) free time with his family, as a combination swim team-soccer-marching band dad. He is also an avid musician, previously being the drummer in a three-piece rock band, and continuing as an independent singer/songwriter and guitarist. See if you can find his music on streaming services!
Since 2022, Bjerke 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.
Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?
Dave Bjerke: What feels like a lifetime ago, I graduated from college, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I ended up as a drummer in a band for about four and a half years, but then the band broke up and I realized I needed a real job.
I’ve always liked politics, but I hated being political — I didn't want to work for the parties. So, I jumped at the chance when I saw a job opportunity in Fairfax County to be an election specialist in 2007. I did really well, and ended up spending two and a half years in Fairfax County before I got noticed and my name came up when the city of Falls Church needed a new registrar. I've been in Falls Church for 16 years now. As my supervisor in Fairfax County said, “Elections are strange. Either it gets in your blood or you won’t last a year.”
Issue One: What part of the election administration story in Virginia do you think is not told or widely understood enough?
Dave Bjerke: One of the things that I don't think most people know is that we're always in election mode. Before I started as an election specialist in Fairfax County, I was working as a consultant. When I got the job in Fairfax County, my consultant coworkers asked me, “After Election Day, what are you going to do for the rest of the year?” I said, “I don’t know, but they offered me a full-time job, so I guess there’s something to do.” The next year was like drinking from a fire hose, finding out there really is a lot to do. It’s not like you show up for one day a year and “election fairy dust” makes all those election officers and election equipment appear.
Every six months, there is an election: the general election is every November, whether it’s state and local offices on the ballot or federal, the primaries for the general election are in June, every four years, there’s also a presidential primary, and then places like Fairfax County have a lot of special elections.
In my first two years working in elections, I got to witness the cascade of special elections when one legislator is elected to a higher office, and then that legislator’s office becomes vacant, and then another legislator gets elected to that office, and so it’s a constant cascade of special elections.
Issue One: How many voters are on the roll in your jurisdiction, and what are the main challenges of a jurisdiction of that size?
Dave Bjerke: The City of Falls Church is very unique — we are two square miles, so if there’s any trouble at all, I will hear about it. When I first got here 16 years ago, we had 8,000 registered voters, and we are now up to 12,000 registered voters.
As an independent city, Falls Church is not part of any county, so we have to run our own elections. In the 1940s, before we were incorporated as an independent city, Fairfax County did take care of our elections, but now it’s all up to my small office. When I got here, I was the only full-time person in the office – even my chief deputy was only part-time. Since the pandemic, we've been able to bring my chief deputy up to full-time and add an extra full-time deputy position just to handle the workload, which especially increased with all the mail voting during the pandemic. Still, there’s not a lot of us.
Issue One: How do you think Falls Church’s proximity to D.C. affects the political participation of your voters?
Dave Bjerke: Because we’re right next to D.C., Falls Church became a city because of the good school system. People move here specifically for the schools, so it makes the land here more expensive. As a result, we have a very high education level and a very high income level, which correlates to a very high voter registration level and a very high voter turnout level. One of the great things about this is that I have no problem getting election officers. In fact, the hardest part is saying “no” to people who want to become an election officer because of how many we have. Having a population that really wants to be involved is a fantastic situation to be in, so the city of Falls Church is a great place to learn how democracy works.
Issue One: What is the price tag of running an election in your jurisdiction, and where does funding for election administration in your jurisdiction come from?
Dave Bjerke: The total cost of an election always depends on the type of election. For a smaller primary, there's not going to be a lot of turnout. Whereas presidential elections have a ton of turnout. I’d estimate that presidential elections are usually about $15,000, and then it goes down to $11-12,000 for a single party primary. Election officers are our biggest expense. We don't need a ton of election officers — we generally hire about 30 of them — but that cost by itself is usually about $6,000.
The funding for our elections comes from a combination of local and state government, but mostly it's a local government issue. Every year, I need to go to the city council and ask for a budget, which I usually have no problem with. If I want to change how much we pay election officers, I have to go separately to the city council to ask to change our ordinances. The State of Virginia reimburses Falls Church for the salaries of the registrars and the three-member electoral board.
Issue One: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think the federal government should routinely contribute to election administration costs?
Dave Bjerke: Elections are considered critical infrastructure by the federal government. We've always been known as a cornerstone of democracy. So when the federal government says it has an interest in making sure all 50 states and seven territories are conducting elections in some way uniformly, there really should be some funding to go along with that. Nobody likes an unfunded mandate. Obviously, the rules and implementation for elections are a little different in each state — as I say, there are 50 states and 50 different ways of doing elections — but we all have to operate under the same federal legislation, so there needs to be some mechanism for funding the changes to elections that federal legislation brings.
Now that we're operating in an age of cybersecurity issues, it's even more important that there is funding for training and resources to prepare and address such issues.
There needs to be a funding mechanism so that if you need to do something like enhance election security and your state or local government doesn't have that money, the federal government will step up. I really do think it needs to be a yearly thing, as not every municipality has the same needs at the same time, and we're constantly updating, so there needs to be a pool of money that can get distributed evenly over time.
Issue One: You’ve previously worked in election administration at the county level in Fairfax County, VA, and currently work at the municipal level for the City of Falls Church, VA. What are some of the differences in election administration work at the county level and the municipal level?
Dave Bjerke: As I said earlier, getting into Fairfax County was like drinking from a fire hose. I was the appointed voting equipment custodian, and at the time I came in, there were about 1,200 pieces of equipment that I had to figure out how to work. I was given a team of anywhere from 20 to 30 “rovers,” who were retired chief election officers that helped test the equipment. My job was never done. I would have to look at the clock and say, "Okay, I've got to go home now. I will come back tomorrow and continue working on this." I ended up with so much overtime during presidential elections because I often wasn’t allowed to go home until a certain task was done. I would end up working until 10pm, and on election nights we’d be there until two in the morning and then have to get back into the office at eight in the morning.
Also, our setup was different. There were essentially two sides of the office: there was the registrar side, where you had assistant registrars (now called deputy registrars), and they managed voter registration. They were getting forms, processing them, and filing them. And then on my side of the office, we had several people involved in making sure that we had election officers, equipment, signs, and training materials. We also had an election manager, a person on campaign finance, and myself. Between the two sides of the office, there was our central absentee precinct and our central absentee manager. That was the person who would take some of my rovers to manage absentee matters, what with all the overseas voters that Fairfax County has. It was quite a big operation and very specialized.
Then, when I got to Falls Church, suddenly I had to wear every hat as the one full-time person. I had to learn campaign finance, how to register voters, how to mail out election communications – do it all. But I did have help. When I first started, there were four people that came into the office for either half time or a couple hours as needed. There's always something to plan for and if I think I'm really done, I need to ask myself, “What have I missed?”
There's always something to do that’ll keep me busy, but it's not like Fairfax County, where as big as they are, they would need to add more people and still the job was never done.
Issue One: You have previously been a co-chair of the Voter Registrar’s Association of Virginia (VRAV) Region 5. How does membership in an association like VRAV help improve election administration in participating localities?
Dave Bjerke: Associations are really important to make sure that all localities are practicing uniformity in elections, especially when it comes to the state code. Additionally, in elections, there are regional differences – in population, differences between rural and urban voters, and politically. The northern Virginia area tends to heavily favor Democrats, whereas the more rural areas favor Republicans. So, I have a lot more in common with Arlington and Fairfax County than I do with some of the localities in Southwest Virginia that are similar in size to Falls Church population-wise, and through the association, we get to talk to each other about that.
At a regional level, we get to discuss amongst our group how to make sure that we're all following the same laws and best practices uniformly. We also have our yearly VRAV full membership meeting, where all the regional groups get together and we can hear from other parts of the state and see how they are dealing with things, because sometimes issues cross-pollinate.
Issue One: How has the role of an election official evolved over the almost two decades you’ve been in the field?
Dave Bjerke: While we wear many hats, explaining that to voters has become very difficult. Some voters think, “It shouldn't be hard to just count votes, right?”
For example, recently, a lot of people have been saying we should be hand counting votes. That might make sense in a parliamentary one-race system like you might have in Germany, but the U.S. is not a parliamentary system. We're a constitutional government, we have three layers — federal, state, and local. We need machines because machines count better than humans. It’s fine if you want to do a hand count audit afterwards, but if you want election administrators to hand count ballots, you're really trying to undermine the integrity of democracy in our system.
So much of our work nowadays is just making sure that all of our bases are covered, that we have lots of transparency but also security. We need to make sure that a voter feels comfortable that their vote not only is being counted, but also is a secret ballot and how they voted will not be discovered, while also understanding that the election that they vote in is public record. Part of that is making sure that voters are comfortable with our equipment — have faith that it works, that we're always testing it, that we have the receipts for their votes. This means that now we are increasingly having to go out into the community and make sure that voters understand that we have these transparency programs and the ability for them to visit the office and see what we do.
Issue One: In recent years, election-related misconceptions, conspiracy theories, and lies have proliferated. How has this impacted your daily work?
Dave Bjerke: We are dealing with a lot of mis- and disinformation about elections now. We are dealing with people who want to undermine the integrity of our elections, and on many levels, they are succeeding. It's very difficult to combat that, because as local election officials, we can only do so much.
Part of that is educating young people — doing our yearly voter registration drives at the schools, making sure we're talking to the civics and history teachers, and having some face-to-face time with students to let them know how elections work.
Even in a highly educated area like Falls Church, I still come across many misconceptions about elections. There's a percentage of long-time voters that don't have faith in our elections anymore. And it's sad. I wish I had a better way of phrasing that, but it's sad. The federal government could help by spending money to combat this.
Issue One: Given all these challenges, what inspires you to stay in this line of work?
Dave Bjerke: I still love democracy. I love the constitutional republic. Starting from the history of our founding, America was a bunch of landowning white men who decided that they weren't getting the respect from England that they thought they were due, so they started their own country, knowing that while asking for their own liberty, they were denying the liberty of other people. Over time, the fight for non-whites and women to get the franchise has progressed, so that all citizens can now vote. But we're still fighting. Clearly, not everybody can vote – there are so many state laws that have been passed in the years since section five of the VRA was dismantled. Democracy is messy.
I think for too long we have been very complacent with how things are, all while there are forces that know what they want to do and never stopped fighting for what they want. We now need to stop being complacent. We are the people who need to show up for the next generation. I have four children, and I've been trying to teach them all about elections. They are the people that I'm hoping will take up the mantle of keeping the franchise going, and so we are the people that need to show up now and fight to show that elections still matter. It is one person, one ballot, and it should not matter how much money you have — we are all supposed to be created equal under the law. While we know that's not how it is in practice, we are going to continue the fight to make sure that all citizens can vote and that all citizens become educated enough to know how to vote.
Issue One: Outside of being passionate about safe and secure elections, what are your hobbies?
Dave Bjerke: Well, I mentioned I’ve got four kids, so I’m a big family man. I’ve become a swimming dad, a soccer dad, and a marching band dad. I even became a soccer coach for three out of four of my kids’ teams. I am also a musician. I used to say I was in the best band you’ve never heard of! I played drums and guitar, and I liked to write. Music is fun.
Issue One: Which historical figure would you have most liked to have had an opportunity to meet?
Dave Bjerke: To sit down with either President Lincoln or General-turned-President Grant and ask, "What do you think about everything that's happened in this country since reconstruction was not allowed to finish?" would probably be the conversation that I think about having the most.
Amelia Minkin is a research associate at Issue One.
Rebecca Dorsey is an Election Protection Intern at Issue One.
