Dec 23, 2025 By Garrett Neese 3 min read

Greene County is reconfiguring its elections office after the recent resignation of the seventh elections director to hold the post since 2020.

Earlier this month, the Greene County commissioners accepted the resignation of Kierra Cannon as elections director retroactive to Nov. 4, Election Day.

The Rices Landing native was hired in April after spending a year and a half as a caseworker for the county’s department of Child and Youth Services. Before working for the county, Cannon spent 10 years as a teacher at Calvary Chapel Christian School in Brownsville.

Cannon said the elections director job “just did not seem like the right fit,” declining to elaborate. She did not comment on if the job had been different than she’d envisioned it.

“I highly respect the commissioners, and it wasn’t anything anybody did to make me leave the position,” she said.

Greene County Board Chair Jared Edgreen was complimentary of Cannon’s performance in the job.

“We tried to keep her here,” he said. “She was a great asset for us, but she believes she’s being called somewhere else.”

Cannon was the seventh person to hold the post since longtime director Tina Kiger left the role

after the 2020 August primaries.

Edgreen said the county is taking applications for an acting elections director and acting elections manager position. Both positions would undergo a year of mentorship under Jessica Goughnour, a longtime elections worker with 18 years of experience in Westmoreland County. Goughnour had been hired for clerical duties and to provide guidance ahead of the November general election.

The elections director role is one of the most scrutinized roles in the county, Edgreen said, and also one with a steep learning curve. He recalled one workshop he attended where commissioners heard it takes up to four years for someone to truly become comfortable in the office.

“Instead of having these positions and throwing them into a very difficult job with no experience, we have secured the same consultant we had in the lead-up to the election,” Edgreen said. “…Our hope is through this mentorship, this training, they can grow into the roles.”

Current Elections Manager Josephine Weingardt is one of the applicants for the acting elections director role, Edgreen said. The board also approved compensation for Weingardt for taking on extra duties, temporarily increasing her salary 5% to $21.63 an hour retroactively for the period from Oct. 12 to Nov. 19.

The acting positions will pay less than the full-time roles, Edgreen said — $53,000 for director, and $34,000 for manager — allowing them to bring on Goughnour while staying within the department’s budget.

No date has been set for a final decision on hiring, but the board hopes to have people in place soon, Edgreen said.

Cannon, who had taken on a part-time job at the Bowlby Library in Waynesburg before the election, is now the library’s director of youth programming.

Her advice to the next elections director is to “just learn everything you can, and lead with kindness and dignity.”