As an undergrad, Tammy Patrick (LA’91) thought she wanted to be a professor of literature. Now she travels the country lecturing, but not about books. 

Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, is one of the nation’s most distinguished elections administrators. She got her start as a temp for Maricopa County, which hired her to test voting equipment while the Arizona telephone company she worked for was on strike.

Once the strike lifted, Patrick returned to the phone company as a sales consultant, rising through the ranks. “But I just kept thinking about how exciting it was to watch ballots be counted,” she says. “Once you work in elections, you can never get away from them. So I kept an eye on the county website; when there was an opening, I jumped at the opportunity, even though it meant taking a two-thirds pay cut.”

For the next 11 years, Patrick oversaw the creation of ballots in Spanish, braille, and even unwritten Native American languages; ensured compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act; wrote grants; and gave congressional testimony on voting legislation, among other tasks. “I was very fortunate that I was allowed to explore whatever I was curious about,” she says.

That curiosity eventually led Patrick all the way to the White House. “We had those really long lines at the 2012 elections, and President Obama announced in his 2013 State of the Union address that he was going to create a nonpartisan committee to fix it,” she says. “Next thing I knew, I had this voicemail from the White House. I figured I was a reference for someone else, but it turned out they were gauging my interest in being on the committee. I said, ‘if it’s a scale of 1 to 10, mark me down as an 11.’”

Patrick was elected to the committee, where she coauthored The American Voting Experience report in 2014. “We thought it was full of good, practical recommendations and were hopeful it wouldn’t sit on the shelf and get dusty, but we weren’t prepared for how well it was received,” she says. In fact, it was so well received that the bipartisan Democracy Fund, a foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyear, hired Patrick in 2017 to help carry out the report’s proposals. 

Patrick commutes to the Democracy Fund’s offices in Washington, DC, from southern Maryland, where she and her husband, Jeff,  are restoring an 1890s farmhouse — and working on new music. The singer-songwriter has recorded five albums, one for every election year since 2000. “Music is my therapy,” she says. “When the FBI was vetting me for the committee, they asked whether my music was political, and I said that the personal is always political. Voting and the arts are two very powerful ways people have to make a difference, and I’m hopeful I’ve been able to make a small one.”

“Voting and the arts are two very powerful ways people have to make a difference”