Overacker was born in Centreville (now Fremont), in the East Bay area around San Francisco, California.

[1] Her father owned a fruit growing business, but he later became a rancher, and the family moved to St. Helena, California, where Overacker attended high school.

[1] However, the school had limited women's attendance to only 500 at a time, and Overacker arrived in her first semester to discover that they had exceeded the cap and she was forced to return home.

[1] After the end of the war, she traveled around Europe with the YMCA to assist with administration there, before returning to Stanford in 1919.

[2] Overacker helped to give the new political science department an early focus on practical topics like bureaucracy and government administration, in response to the academic disruptions caused by WWII.

West died in 1927, Overacker was invited to compile his lectures and notes into a book, which she published under the title Money in Elections in 1932.

[5] Because of Overacker's early work on the topic of campaign finance, she was chosen by the Citizen's Research Foundation as one of the namesakes for their Overacker-Heard Campaign Finance Data Archive, later maintained by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

[1] Before Overacker's death in 1982, the American Political Science Association had been preparing a special symposium in her honor.

[1] In citing her work, Robert Caro referred to Overacker as her "era's leading academic expert on campaign finance".