Cannon jumping into Greene County elections director role
As a sixth-grade teacher at Calvary Chapel Christian School in Brownsville, Kierra Cannon would lead her history class in mock elections, teaching them about the importance of their rights as citizens and of doing things with integrity.
Over the past few weeks, she’s gotten a new opportunity to put her ideals into practice. Cannon, 30, was appointed last month as Greene County’s new elections director, starting April 11.
She’s always been passionate about people using their voting rights, she said. And she loves still getting to use her skills as an educator.
“I was really excited to use my background to kind of launch myself into this position, and it’s been going great so far,” she said.
The Rices Landing native spent 10 years as a teacher at Calvary Chapel, starting out in preschool before moving to teaching history and literature for sixth through eighth-graders.
For the past year and a half, Cannon had been employed by the county as a Child and Youth Services caseworker.
It was a different kind of stress than teaching, she said. Knocking on doors forced her out of her comfort zone. And it was an experience that she said “made stress launch me instead of scare me.”
“Working in that stressful environment of Children and Youth brought me to have a sense of calm,” she said. I’m not scared of people getting angry with me. I know it’s inevitable. No matter how perfect you could be in the world, people are going to get mad at you.”
That mentality made her more excited than scared to take on what’s been a high-turnover role as of late. Cannon became the county’s seventh elections director since 2020.
While the elections director position is important, she said, it’s another variety of stress from what she faced at CYS: the kind where she “can be stressed packing envelopes.”
With the May 20 primary looming, she’s already had plenty of chances. It requires constant attention to detail, she said, such as double-checking envelope after envelope to make sure address labels match the ID number.
“Everybody says this is probably the hardest one to jump into,” she said. “So if we can get through this, then we’re good.”
On Tuesday, the last day for voters to apply for a mail-in ballot, she said the most recent figures showed 1,872 ballots being mailed out to voters — though that number continues to rise.
“We’ve been getting flooded with phone calls that people haven’t received their ballots yet, but they’re coming,” she said. “I keep telling them, ‘We looked in our system, and they are sent.'”
She’s gotten help from a variety of sources throughout the primary, both within the elections office and from other departments such as the Department of Human Services.
After the primary, she and elections manager Josephine Weingart plan to give the office a “mini-makeover,” making some cosmetic upgrades and adjusting the physical layout of the office to make it more organized.
In this and future elections, Cannon also wants to ensure the elderly can vote. After running it by the Pennsylvania Department of State, she’s already put into place one solution for seniors worried about mailing their ballots back.
“They can pull up to the curb, give us a call, and I’ll run out there and take their ballot in here for them, so they don’t have to get out of the car,” she said.