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It’s the lunch hour and Annette Newingham is out for her daily walk.
This is no stroll. When Newingham walks, she walks as if she has somewhere to be.
She walks out the front door of the Lane County elections office in downtown Eugene, heads north for a few blocks, goes up and over a hill by Skinner Butte, follows a path along the Willamette River, returns over another hill and arrives back at her office exactly one hour later.
Along the way she eats a banana, covers her life story, explains the complexities of the electoral process and waxes philosophic about the importance of treating life like a series of adventures.
She is simultaneously unwinding and winding up, decompressing from her morning while she plots solutions to problems that may be months into the future. This is multi-tasking, Newingham-style, and the county’s elections supervisor wouldn’t have it any other way.
“This is very good for me because I’m a high-energy sort of person,” Newingham says. “(Problem-solving) is fun. I like that kind of thing — I thrive on it. I don’t like it when things slow down.”
No chance of that over the next three weeks. It’s the middle of the primary election season so Newingham and staff are preparing to count about 100,000 Lane County ballots — about half of which are expected to arrive in a flood leading up to Election Day, May 20.
There was a time when Newingham would never have seen herself in this line of work. But after 18 years at the helm of the county’s election operations, it’s hard to see her doing anything else.
Newingham was a manager for Pacific Northwest Bell/AT&T before joining Lane County government in 1988 as a records supervisor. A wife and mother of four with corkscrew curls falling around her face, she is an unabashed control freak.

registerguard.com