Workload and Staffing

The local elections official community is united to serve voters and deliver democracy to hundreds of millions of eligible citizens. But it is also a community that struggles with increasing workloads, low pay, and sometimes inadequate staffing. Overall, the “typical” elections office is small, with few staff members mastering the increasingly complex job of managing safe, secure, and accessible elections. The most common type of office has one or zero full-time staff–34% of jurisdictions have a single official operating on their own. Another 17% operate with just one additional staff member.  And over four-fifths of the offices in the country have five or fewer staff members. The differences by jurisdiction size are profound: 84% of the largest jurisdictions have more than 50 staff members, compared to 93% of the smallest jurisdictions which have five or fewer staff members. Of course, such differences are to be expected given how many registered voters are served in these larger jurisdictions. At the same time, any increases in workload as a result of new methods of voting, new reporting requirements, and unexpected events like a global pandemic, will create the most challenges in those smaller localities. This kind of disparate change is exactly what our surveys have shown. Overall workload, measured by the percentage agreeing that “election administration is a majority or all of my workload”, increased substantially from 2018 to 2020. Of course, 2020 was a presidential year, so the workload would be expected to increase, but higher levels remained in place in 2022 when compared to 2018. And the lower panel shows where most of the increase occurred — in the smallest jurisdictions.