Election official wins state honor

Editor's note: Scott Wetzel, a Huron County board of elections precinct election official, was recently named the 2025 Ohio Precinct Election Official of the Year. The following is a nomination letter written by Ben Kline, deputy director at the elections board, sent to the Ohio Secretary of State's Office. I am not sure there are enough adjectives to describe Scott Wetzel, but the first that come to mind are intelligent, genuine, and dependable. Scott started as a precinct election official and was quickly asked to be an assistant voting location manager and then voting location manager. In addition, Scott is a seasonal worker that helps with early voting, logic and accuracy, co-instructor for precinct election official and voting location manager classes, training videos, and on the delivery team. Scott lives by the saying that no job is too small or task too big. He will pass out stickers during early voting and just as enthusiastically problem solve why one of the voting machines had a paper jam. Scott dedicates at least 15 weeks of the year to elections. Five weeks each for the primary and general election, but also for the possibility of an August election. To be clear, when I say dedicates, he will not schedule anything roughly a month before any election. Whatever hours we ask, he will be there. Our staff was reviewing our training process and realized we needed more hands-on training. More training means for time; time that you do not have during a presidential year. Being a small staff, we could not afford to take anyone else out of our office to help. We approached Scott to see if he would help. Of course Scott said yes, but I anticipated there was going to be a learning curve. Having already been around the different machines as a voting location manager, he was familiar with the processes and hit the ground running. I watched him present at one of our classes and I never looked back. One of things that I admire of Scott is how he is not a "yes sir" kind of person. Some people will agree with what their boss says and never question anything. Scott is respectful but thinks on his own. For example, we came up with the idea of having our precinct election officials watch a series of videos in place of discussing it at our precinct election official training. On the surface it sounded like a great idea, we would cut our training time roughly in half and get to other projects. Scott asked me who my audience was. He also asked how we were going to get the videos to our precinct election officials. Scott knew that the average age of our precinct election officials is 71. He went on to tell me that I would be spending more time on the phone trying to explain how to watch the videos than talking with our precinct election officials. We went on to make the videos but decided to incorporate them into our training. It was a big success rather than a disaster thanks to Scott's input. It is worth noting that Scott was in a majority of the videos that we made. In typical Scott fashion, he jokingly told everyone that if he becomes a famous movie star because of these videos he might not be able to help with elections anymore. Scott's personality makes people at ease. Whether he is helping someone during early voting or training a new voting location manager, he is calm and can explain things in a way they can understand. For the past several elections, we have assigned new assistant voting location managers to Scott so they could get on the job training while learning from an expert. Really think about this, he is trying to run a polling location with all kinds of moving pieces, and we assign him an extra task of having someone follow him around all day. There are many other great stories, but I will leave you with one that exemplifies the kind of person Scott is. During the 2024 Presidential General Election, one of our voting location managers became sick and had to go home. We weighed our options as to how to proceed. We could have a ranger/rover take over or have Scott finish the day at the location where the voting location manager was sick. The determining factor was we knew Scott already had things figured out at his assigned location. The workers knew what to do as Scott had been coaching them during prior elections and throughout the day. Scott spent the last few hours at his new location. We had several people at the new location tell our office how great Scott was and thankful he was there. What went unnoticed to most people is that after closing his new location and turning in supplies to the BOE, Scott went back to his original location and helped close that polling location. No one asked him to do that. He very easily could have gone home after a long day, but that is not who Scott is. When the work is done, then Scott is done. For the reasons listed above and the often overlooked reasons, Scott Wetzel is deserving of the 2024 Precinct Election Official of the Year Award.