A good election, Jessily Joseph will tell you, is a boring one.
"You don't want to be noteworthy," said Joseph, who was appointed executive director of the Peoria County Election Commission on May 21. "Success is having voters and citizens be confident in this process — and making voting accessible and secure."
That's the job ahead of her, with the Nov. 3 general election now less than six months away. Joseph oversees everything the commission does, "from recruiting election judges, training election judges, maintaining our voting equipment, we even create the ballot ourselves," she said.
Early voting begins Sept. 24.
The commission currently has fewer than 300 election judges and needs closer to 350 for November.
For anyone skeptical about mail-in ballots or how the process works, Joseph said as an election judge, you can take a look behind the curtain.
"Serve as an election judge or as a poll watcher," she said, "so that you can see all of the security and chain of custody that has to occur for a vote by mail ballot."
Election judges are paid $250 for the day and are paid for training.
Peoria County is the only countywide election commission in Illinois, established by referendum in 2015.
Most jurisdictions in the state run elections through partisan county clerks. In Peoria, the staff is nonpartisan and overseen by a bipartisan board — a setup Joseph said works well in the current climate.
"With the current state of elections and how they've been questioned, I think it's really useful to have an election commission and have that nonpartisan status," she said. "It kind of adds an extra layer of security, especially in the minds of a citizen or a voter."
Voter engagement, she said, tends to follow a predictable pattern. "Our voter registration numbers go up in presidential years, and then they kind of go down again."
Even though local elections get less attention, she said those races — school boards, library boards, county board seats — are the ones that shape daily life most directly, deciding everything from how taxpayer dollars are allocated to which books sit on library shelves to how local schools are run.
As for Joseph herself: she's a Peoria native who did her undergrad at Knox College in Galesburg, earned a master's in political science from the London School of Economics, worked in finance, and ultimately came back home.
Joseph joined the commission as assistant director in 2022 and has spent nearly four years overseeing mail-in ballot processing, judge training, and the commission's finances. She served briefly as interim director before being appointed permanently last week.
"Voting is just one of the most powerful tools that we have as citizens," she said. "I wanted to be a part of that."
