Christy McCormick, BA ’85, U.S. Election Assistance Commissioner
Photo by Douglas Levere
The November 2024 presidential election was closing in fast, and much of the nation was worried about it. Some were concerned about an alarming rise in threats against election workers. Others fretted over fears of wide-spread voter fraud. Still others were startled by candidates’ vows to jail election officials.
Christy McCormick was not one of them. She is one of four members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in Washington, D.C., tasked with helping states and local jurisdictions conduct free and fair elections.
“Election administrators are capable of handling a myriad of scenarios, and I believe that will shine through in this election,” reasoned McCormick.
Perhaps fortunately for McCormick and her fellow commissioners, the EAC is little known by the public—even though it is the lead non-partisan advisory body for the more than 8,500 local election jurisdictions throughout the country, tests and certifies computerized voting systems and helps recruit the one million poll workers who carry out the balloting. That has left the commission relatively untouched by the partisan controversy and direct attacks endured by other election agencies.
Still, McCormick is no stranger to ballot-box conflict. She joined the Department of Justice under then Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2006 as a senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. In 2009 she was a deputy Rule of Law coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. “I went over there as an elections expert,” she says of her one-year stint in the Green Zone. “I experienced a lot. It was dangerous, but the adrenaline keeps you going.”
McCormick was born in Connecticut and moved to Long Island in time for high school. She began college at Buffalo State, transferred briefly to Michigan Tech, then returned to Buffalo and received her English degree at UB. Though McCormick eventually earned her law degree from George Mason University, a law career was something she first envisioned while at UB.
“It took me a while,” she said. “I ended up getting married and having a child. And when my daughter was about 8 and I was working at Yale, I decided to take the LSAT to see how I did. I did well and decided to go to law school.”
In more than 30 years of election service stretching back before her appointment to the EAC by President Barack Obama in 2014, McCormick has seen plenty of change.
"Election officials used to do their job in relative anonymity,” she said. “That’s changed over the last decade or so. Now there’s a lot of scrutiny on election officials. More responsibility, too—they didn’t have to worry about cybersecurity, artificial intelligence. Now they’ve got to be experts at all kinds of things.”
“Most people think you roll the machine out once a year, take a vote, roll it back in the closet and that’s it,” she said. “But this is a 24/7 job. There’s a lot of pressure on election officials to get it right. They don’t get any do-overs—time is of the essence. You have a deadline.”
Threats against election officials and poll workers have also grown, she notes.
“Danger is a big concern,” she noted. “Whether the threats come through social media, phone calls—it’s just unacceptable. These are just civil servants doing their jobs, and they should be able to do it in peace and safety just like the rest of us.”
At the EAC she must remain above partisan politics. “The interesting thing about the election integrity movement is that it has moved from the left to the right,” she observed, taking the long view. “Back when I stared in the DOJ in the early 2000s, it was more the left movement that didn’t trust the voting technology—they called it a ‘black box,’ nobody knew what was in it. Now that integrity movement has moved to the right.”
McCormick doesn’t see all the scrutiny as a bad thing. “We should be interested in transparency and making sure we’re not having issues with suppression or fraud or noncitizen voting or mail-in voting.”
All of that was put to the test on Nov. 5. Would widespread fears of attacks on poll workers, voter fraud or delays in vote counting materialize? Fortunately, no—much to McCormick's relief.
“I think the elections went relatively smoothly,” she said. “While incidents did arise, they were quickly addressed and officials effectively communicated that to voters.”
Story by Jeff Z. Klein
Published January 10, 2025