The position announcement has been posted on the Carroll County website and applications will be taken through April 1.
Deese said she had originally intended to work a few more years, but decided to retire during a relatively slow year so that her replacement does not have to come in during a busy presidential election year.
“Since I already knew I wanted to retire, this seemed like the perfect time,” she said Thursday. “We’re starting a new voter registration system and it’s the perfect time for a new supervisor to come in on the ground floor. I hope I’ll have some time to spend with the new person to help make a smooth transition.
“I’m really going to retire this time.”
She retired from the U.S. Postal Service on Aug. 1, 2010, only to begin her job as county election supervisor the next day.
“I’m going to enjoy being a homemaker, a grandmother and I may study art,” she said. “I may do some volunteer work. I want to do some things I never had the opportunity to do.”
Deese said her leaving has nothing to do with the recent county administration change and she has enjoyed working with both current county commission Chairman Marty Smith and former Chairman Bill Chappell.
“I’m sorry I won’t get to work longer with Marty, but I know he’ll be successful,” she said.
Smith said Thursday that he understands Deese’s reasons for wanting to leave and said, “It’s a good time for someone to come in and learn the job.”
Deese praised Voter Registration Coordinator Janice Duff and other staff members, the Board of Elections members and all the volunteer poll workers.
“They are all seasoned professionals and a great group of people to work with,” she said. “The staff in all the county departments have been very cooperative and helpful and we all worked well together. I’ll miss that.”
Deese said the department was in good shape when she came into the job and she was able to make it through a steep learning curve.
She said she’s proud of the accomplishments she and her staff have made in the past three years. She said the work involved converting all the voter records into digital format.
“We brought the logic in accuracy testing inside and developed a crew to do it,” she said. “That was a savings to taxpayers.”
Deese said she’s proud of the office’s performance through the 2011 reapportionment process and all the elections during 2012.
“We didn’t see any of the long lines here that some other counties had,” she said. “We were able to get a lot of registered voters out to vote and it was a smooth election process.”
Deese was born and raised in Carrollton and graduated from Carrollton High School. She attended Carroll Technical College and West Georgia College before entering the postal service as a substitute rural mail carrier in 1977. She worked her way up the postal system, getting her first postmaster job in Cave Spring, Ga., in 1996. She later served as postmaster in Tallapoosa and Bremen before moving to Carrollton in 2003 as officer in charge. She was postmaster at the Carrollton Post Office from 2004 through 2010.