Helen Gienau, who served as Polk County Supervisor of Elections for 24 years, died March 31 at age 98.
Gienau, a Bartow native, was first elected as a Democrat in the bicentennial year of 1976, succeeding Blanche Work. Gienau directed the county’s elections until her retirement in 2000.
Before becoming Supervisor of Elections, Gienau spent 15 years on the staff of U.S. Rep. James A. Haley, according to previous Ledger reporting.
Former employees credited Gienau with updating machinery and procedures in the Polk County Elections office.
“She’d been through several recounts in the prior years, leading up to 2000, and so she wanted to modernize in advance of what she knew would be a big election,” said Christine Goding, who worked in the elections office from 1991 to 2018. “And so she pushed the County Commission to get new voting equipment.”
An article in The Ledger from 2000 detailed some of the improvements that Gienau oversaw. Polk was the first county in Florida to store records on optical disk and later to transfer them to a hard drive, the report said. Gienau also directed the transition to paperless filing, putting all of the office’s reports and data into a computer database.
Gienau’s office installed its own mapping system, making it easier to update voting precincts amid annexations and new housing developments. Polk was the state’s first county to add bar codes on absentee ballot stubs and envelopes to eliminate errors, earning Gienau national recognition, The Ledger reported.
“She was just very proactive in the things that she did,” said Cathy Bridges, who joined the office in 1992 and worked there for 33 years.
The elections office also finalized its website during Gienau’s tenure. And the office initiated voter registration in high schools while providing educational materials to schools, civic groups and churches.
Gienau instituted a more efficient procedure for tabulating election results, Bridges said. The office had previously brought ballots from each precinct to the main office for counting on election nights, delaying the release of election results for hours, Bridges said.
That changed with the switch to precinct counts, in which employees ran ballots through tabulators at each voting site and brought the memory cards with results to the Supervisor of Elections headquarters.
Goding said the new system also allowed voters to learn immediately if their ballots contained errors, such as two votes cast in one race.
‘Very genteel southern lady’
Bridges and Goding also fondly recalled Gienau for her management style.
“She always kept her cool in everything, in any kind of situation,” Bridges said.
“I would say that she thought of her employees as family,” Goding said. “There was a daily coffee break that everybody participated in, and there were some excellent bakers there. And she made sure that we all got together at those coffee breaks and that we talked to each other.”
Gienau also made an impression with her traditional manners, the former employees said.
“She just was really a consummate southern lady,” Goding said. “She was always very genteel and never showed any anger. She was just a very kind lady and highly educated and just a very genteel southern lady.”
Bridges recalled that Gienau was “always dressed to the nines.”
Gienau was married for 56 years to Ralph Gienau, until his death, and the couple had two daughters. Gienau was a member of the Bartow chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.
In a Ledger profile from 2010, Gienau recalled roller skating through Bartow’s streets when she was 9 or 10. She reported that she began lifting weights regularly at age 71. In her 80s, she trained three days a week at a fitness center in Bartow.
“(With) six cats, a pet bird and an acre of yard to keep, I am never without anything to do,” Gienau said in 2010.
Born in 1927, shortly before the Great Depression, Gienau remembered the local effects of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack for a Ledger article. The teenager was sitting in the Ritz Theater in Bartow, watching a movie with friends, when her mother burst in to report that the country was suddenly at war.
Gienau continued to follow politics closely until the end of her life, Bridges said.
Gienau’s service will be held April 8 at the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in Bartow, with a visitation at 10 a.m. and the funeral at 11 a.m.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Helen Gienau, transformative Polk elections supervisor, dies at 98
Reporting by Gary White, Lakeland Ledger / The Ledger
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