With early voting less than three weeks away, Nicole Mickley was staring down a daunting to-do list: voting machines to test, poll workers to recruit, an onslaught of public records requests to examine.
And then, over a weekend, came word that the long-time county sheriff had died. To Mickley, director of elections in a small Ohio county, that added one more complication to an election season filled with them. It meant a new contest was needed to fill the position, so she and her small staff would have to remake the ballots for the fall election for the second time in a week.
