A sheet of voter stickers is seen inside a polling station in California.
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A sheet of voter stickers is seen inside a polling station in California.
David McNew/Getty Images
Stephen Richer has never participated in a presidential election before.
He oversees voting as county registrar in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa County, and took office in 2021.
Yet as November approaches in this closely scrutinized state of transition, Richer finds himself looking at the profession as a whole and realizing that he is essentially an old hand.
“There are 15 recorders in 15 counties…and I’m already, I think, the fifth or fourth oldest of the 15,” Richer recently told NPR, at an event hosted by the Campaign Legal Center. “So, yes, (the turnover) is real.”
A new report released Tuesday confirms this and provides the most in-depth national analysis yet of the people at the heart of the democratic process: the thousands of election officials across the United States who administer the vote.
It has been clear for some time that the work environment in these jobs was becoming unsustainable. Threats and harassment have become commonplace since the wave of election lies that followed Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, while at the same time the actual tasks required are increasingly complex.
And this new report, by researchers at UCLA and the Bipartisan Policy Center, confirms that people are now leaving the profession at a faster rate than at any time in the previous two decades.
But the report also adds new context to the phenomenon.
A vision of turnover over 20 years
Notably, the report examined the issue of long-term turnover and found that while attrition did increase after 2020, it has been increasing slowly for years, meaning “election administration could be more equipped to answer it than had been previously speculated.”
“Turnover is not a new phenomenon,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Election Project. “This is a long-term problem that is rooted in the chronic challenges faced by election administration staff.”
These include chronically low salaries and resources, as well as rapidly changing laws that often add new responsibilities or pressures on election officials.
Orey worked with UCLA’s Joshua Ferrer and Daniel Thompson to analyze a new dataset including more than 18,000 local poll workers in more than 6,000 voting jurisdictions.
The researchers measured whether a local election office changed hands over a 4-year cycle. In 2022 (the most recent year for which data is complete), the turnover rate was 39%, compared to 28% in 2004.
A chart showing the turnover rate of election officials since the 2000 election.
Courtesy of the Bipartisan Policy Center
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Courtesy of the Bipartisan Policy Center
In recent years, as attrition began to snowball, experts feared the impact on 2024 could be disastrous.
New election officials tend to make more mistakes, and conspiracy theories about voting tend to focus on honest incidents to try to build a false narrative that voting in general is unreliable.
But Orey believes this new report should allay some of those fears, because the officials replacing those who leave also have extensive experience working in the field.
“What’s really comforting about this report is that while we’ve seen slight increases in turnover in recent years, the experience level of new civil servants is quite high,” Orey said.
On average, new officials had eight years of electoral experience. And in the largest jurisdictions with more than 100,000 voters, which in recent years have suffered the brunt of misinformation as well as turnover issues, new officials had an average of 11 years of experience.
“These people have experience, perhaps not as a chief electoral officer, but potentially as an MP or working in the office. So they know what it means to run an election and we are confident in their preparedness for the “November is approaching,” Orey said. said. “This report was much more comforting than I expected.”
She added that, provided governments provide the resources and training needed for new officials to succeed, staff turnover can also provide a good opportunity to diversify the electoral landscape. In 2023, the most authoritative survey of top election officials estimated that the workforce was 92% white, with the majority of officials also aged over 50.
“Turnover is a healthy part of maintaining a young, diverse workforce, something election workers have honestly struggled to maintain in the past,” Orey said.
Staff turnover has increased in battleground states
The new report also finds that staff turnover affected election offices regardless of political leaning and geography, but increased sharply in competitive states after 2020.
A chart showing the impact of turnover on election offices in battleground states, as determined by the Cook Political Report.
Courtesy of the Bipartisan Policy Center
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Courtesy of the Bipartisan Policy Center
In North Carolina, the executive director of the state election board spoke out last month about the trend in staff turnover she was seeing there.
“In five years of tracking this information, we’ve had 58 changes of county elections directors. In some of these counties, in that time period, they will be on their third director,” said Karen Brinson Bell, responsible for voting in North Carolina. official. “We are seeing an exodus from this profession across the country.”
Bell said local election officials have had to become experts in cybersecurity and physical security on top of their normal duties, without being paid for these additional responsibilities.
“It’s still a work environment where these people are often paid at the level of administrative work — not to denigrate administrative work — but those jobs are more complex than administrative work,” Bell said. “A long time ago, yes. We sat at a typewriter and typed out voter registration cards.
“This is no longer the case.”
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