County election supervisor keeps voting on track

When she was in school, Ruth Hickman didn’t know she would end up with the job she has today, mostly because, at the time, her job as Monroe County’s election supervisor might not have existed.

“There probably wasn’t one,” she said. “But as elections got bigger and populations just increased ... that’s a lot of stuff to keep track of and a lot of parts.”

Monroe County has almost 95,000 registered voters. Hickman, along with County Clerk Linda Robbins, is in charge of registering voters and delegates for elections.

 With the upcoming elections this year, her office has been especially busy.

“During a presidential year, or a year where there might be registration drives, then they might accept huge volumes of registrations, and then they enter them into a statewide voter registration system,” Hickman said.

She said she has been especially busy this past month.

“I think I had probably more than 200 filings here and there this last filing period,” she said.

Filing for the May 8 primary election ran from Jan. 11 to Feb. 10.

Another major component of what her office does is register delegates, the people who actually cast votes in elections on behalf of the voters.

Her office registers delegates to the state conventions, where, for example, delegates will vote for the Republican candidate Indiana will vote for to run nationally.

She said that, given the numerous Republican candidates fighting to run in the national election, there has been more interest in being a Republican delegate, as these delegates will get to help decide who gets the party nomination for the presidential election.

“They’re filing to be a candidate to be a delegate to go to the state convention,” she said. “They like the idea that their name appears in writing on a ballot with a presidential candidate that they’re supporting.”

Hickman is not new to working within the election process. She has worked in the voter registration office for five years and assumed the post of election supervisor
last year.

“I’ve been involved in the election process for a long, long time,” she said. “And really, this was the only part I hadn’t been involved with, and I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I give this a try?’”

She said she worked in the office during the 2008 presidential election.

“The general election of 2008 was amazingly crazy, and I just loved every minute of it,” she said. “There’s just an incredible amount of parts. And the amazing thing is, there’s an incredible amount of people who volunteer, there’s an incredible amount of people who are paid a stipend, and yet they come back year after year.”