Before working for the Secretary of State, longtime public school teacher Lily Woo admits she didn’t know much about the state’s election process.

“I was one of those voters who walked into my polling location and said hello to the moderator, said hello to people, got my ballot, bought some cookies from whatever group was outside,” Woo said, “never having a clue all the work that went into it.”

Now, her entire job as the state’s civic and voter education coordinator is to pull back the curtain on the election process. Her position was created last summer in a push to foster more voter engagement throughout the state, and she came to the role after teaching social studies in Bow.

Her first task? To create learning resources on New Hampshire voting and elections for use in public schools.

The state passed a law last year that requires middle and high schools to teach about the topic – Woo’s work is separate from that. The curriculum she’s building, she said, is a suggestion at best.

“I would never, ever want to tell a teacher nor a school how they should implement their curriculum,” Woo said. “As a teacher, I always valued the ability to collaborate with my colleagues, with my administration, on how best to serve the needs of the population in my school.”

Every school has a different student population with different needs, she said, and she doesn’t want to step on teachers’ toes. The model curriculum is more like a menu of resources – teachers can pick and choose what they want to incorporate into their classrooms.

To find out what information was needed, Woo spent her first several weeks on the job at 15 poll worker training sessions across the state. She asked the election workers – everyone from moderators to ballot counters – what they wished more people knew about New Hampshire elections.

“The curriculum that I’m building is geared around the responses that the election officials told us were questions they felt they were repeatedly answering,” Woo said.

It brought to light certain topics where more education is “badly needed,” she said. For example, it includes what voters can and cannot wear in polling places due to electioneering laws; how ballot counting devices are safe and can’t be hacked; and what happens if a voter makes a mistake on their ballot.

She’s also creating educational materials for people on what they can expect when they go to vote.

“[It’s] things like that, that will help, for young first-time voters, ease the anxiety maybe of what to expect,” Woo said, “and then for seasoned voters, a reminder of why election officials do what they do.”

Woo said she also hopes to translate some of these materials into other languages as a way to better serve immigrants and non-English speakers. The Secretary of State’s office did something similar a few years ago with pocket voter guides that were printed in multiple languages.

Woo said she’s very much aware that her role, and civic education itself, is a “hot topic” – not just in New Hampshire but nationally. Her job, as with many roles involved in elections and voter education, is under increased scrutiny as voters’ distrust in the process has grown. She did, however, say that she hasn’t received any pushback or hesitance on her position.

With a barrage of misinformation coming at people from all sides – like social media, artificial intelligence and “deviant actors,” Woo said – she’s focused on getting the facts out there.

The Secretary of State’s office produced several videos ahead of the 2024 election to educate people on misinformation, phishing attempts and AI as they relate to elections.

“We’re up against a real giant of a problem,” Woo said. “I think we have to push back against it in any way we can, especially through education.”

Woo blames widespread election mistrust on the pandemic. “Social distancing,” she said, saved people from getting ill, but it created a rift in different groups and communities. 

“When you isolate yourself, you start to cocoon,” Woo said. “I think the opportunity to build back those bridges is really important.”

That’s why she’s also working on starting new programs that she hopes will get people more involved and help them feel less isolated. For example, she’s looking at starting both a collegiate task force to engage college students on the legislation that affects them and an inter-generational program that would connect students with seniors.

“I think if we can build a corps of youth that has its mission to create maybe monthly outreach to veterans … I think we can do that so that veterans know they’re not forgotten,” Woo said.

Her main focus, for now, is to keep building community – whether that’s through education, relationships or otherwise. It’s one reason she took the job in the first place.

“If you strengthen ties of communities, you build back that trust in institutions,” Woo said. “I think that’s what I was hoping for.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.