Clerk’s office seeks redaction funding, flags staffing needs for elections under new automatic registration law

The county clerk presented the recording, filing and elections office budget requests, including funding for an in‑house redaction effort of legacy recorded documents and staffing changes to handle new workload from automatic voter registration and upcoming election cycles.

County Clerk staff said the office has built a custom redaction queue to remove personal identifiers from decades of scanned documents and originally sought a vendor for full-service redaction at an estimated cost of about $1.6 million. Instead, the office proposed an in-house approach and asked for $125,000 (management recommended $100,000) to continue temporarily staffing the project and complete the work using trained temporary staff and local verification. The clerk said the project will make title-worthy documents available through a new public portal once redaction is complete.

Clerk staff also warned that a new automatic voter registration policy (to be implemented July 1) will create a surge of incoming registrations from the motor vehicle system; they said the office has asked the Motor Vehicle Division for daily transaction data but has not yet received full details. To handle elections work and the additional registrations, the clerk requested three personnel changes: an administrative assistant (approved in staff recommendations), a recording-and‑filing lead/records coordinator role and a second bureau-of-elections supervisor to oversee field operations. Presenters cautioned the new automatic registration change could create a substantial workload spike and that the office may need overtime or further temporary staffing depending on the volume of registrations received from MVD.

Elections costs also include two elections in the fiscal year (the regular local election and a gubernatorial primary) that drive high seasonal overtime, poll worker payments (reimbursed by the Secretary of State under MOU) and sheriff overtime for election security. The clerk said poll-worker reimbursement remains part of the SOS MOU but that county security costs historically have not been fully reimbursed by the state. The commission did not take immediate action; staff said redaction funding will be incorporated into the preliminary budget and the clerk will return with any required adjustments to staffing or overtime if the registration inflow proves larger than projected.