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SALT LAKE CITY — This past March, when the deadline for filing to run for reelection came and went and Sherrie Swensen didn't submit her name, she accomplished something no one else had ever been able to do: vote her out of office.
The longest-serving Salt Lake County clerk in history decided eight terms and 32 years was enough.
Like the '72 Dolphins, she's going out undefeated, leaving behind a legacy as arguably the greatest recruiter of voters in state history. She's had other duties, too, like overseeing passports and marriage licensing (she's personally performed well in excess of 1,000 marriages), but her legend is working tirelessly to make sure elections are open to one and all. No one's drummed up the vote like Sherrie.
Growing up, becoming the GOAT of voter turnout wasn't on her vision board. She didn't even have a vision board. She was raised by working-class parents in the working-class part of Murray. Her father, Sterling, was a house painter; her mother, Ethel, a secretary. When she graduated from Murray High School, class of '66, she graduated straight into the workforce. A succession of office and real estate jobs led quite by happenstance to a secretarial position with the Utah Democratic Party.
There, her efficiency and energy caught the eye of party officials, who urged her to run for county clerk. She demurred at first, not being naturally drawn to politics, but all that changed when she learned how relatively difficult it was to register to vote.
"Basically it (voting registration) was kind of a well-kept secret," she says, remembering back to a pre-internet time when paper registration forms could be found behind the desk at the main post office, available on request, and that was about it.
"I just thought that a democracy meant that more people should be representative of the masses of the population," she recalls. "I thought that was important."
So in 1990 she ran, and won. Barely. In 1994 she ran and won. Again barely. But along the way more and more people became aware of what she was doing. In the six elections since, she's won comfortably. In the 2020 election she commanded two-thirds of the vote.
What she was doing was making registration as accessible to as many voters as she possibly could. She toured the county, placing boxes of registration forms in grocery stores, apartment buildings, all post offices, libraries, college campuses, anywhere she could think of. She went to high schools and signed up 18-year-olds. She went to senior citizen centers and signed up 81-year-olds. In the 1992 election, the first major election of her clerkship, the number of registered voters increased dramatically.
She was an early proponent of mail-in voting. She promoted a permanent vote-by-mail registry that was so successful the Utah Legislature followed suit and made mail-in voting a statewide option starting in 2015.
As she prepares to retire — she'll supervise one more major election in November before she officially steps down on Jan. 1, 2023 — identifying the highs of her job is easy: watching people vote. "To see the pride in people to have their voices heard."
The lows? The charges of voter fraud, nationally and to some extent locally, emanating from the 2020 election.
The allegations by Donald Trump, the former president, and his acolytes that the 2020 presidential election was rigged — in all the swing states that mattered — leaves her all but apoplectic.
To Sherrie, and to her colleagues around the country who know a thing or two about how elections work, it's akin to people saying we didn't land a man on the moon.
"I can't imagine how many people would have to have conspired for the fraud they're suggesting to have taken place," she says. "And how many would have to keep quiet. Of course someone would crack. It makes absolutely no sense. The idea of having all these bogus ballots being inserted into our system printed in someone's living room or coming in from China is absolutely ridiculous. The degree of difficulty is physically impossible with the encryption and protections in the software.
"And they're saying the fraud was only in his (Trump's) race. I don't know how they could do it so that one contest would be skewed and the others be valid. I can't even fathom how that could happen.
"It is all so insulting and disheartening, and just wrong."
The challenges to the system were almost enough to cause her to run for another four years — so she could continue to protect and defend a pillar of democracy she loves dearly.
But she'd be 78 at the end of a ninth term.
"It was really hard deciding (to not run again) because now more than ever we need people who have the trust and know the system," she says. "But we all have to age, and it got to a point where I thought, 'It's time.'"
What's on the horizon come Jan. 2? She lists spending more time with her two sons and eight grandchildren, plans for travel and getting around to projects that have been long neglected.
That's what she says on the record. Off the record? "I'll probably be bored to death," she laughs. "I mean seriously, I'm afraid I'll be bored because for so long it's been so time-consuming and so rewarding.
"I loved the job, I just kept running and running," she says. "It seems like eight years, not eight terms, it's gone so fast. Just looking at everything, you kind of pinch yourself a little bit. It was never some grand plan. I would have never imagined all of it happening."
