Clip from a game show never to be aired:

Announcer: “26,824. Is that your final answer, Professor Gronke?”
Gronke: “Let me use my lifeline.”
Clock ticks …
Gronke: “16840.43. That’s my final answer!”
Announcer: “Your final answer to the question `How many election workers
there are in the United States is 16840 point 43??”
Gronke: “Ok, around 20,000. I am very confident that there are around 20,000
election workers in the United States. Or maybe a few thousand more …”
Announcer: On to our next contestant!

The scenario above may never appear on television, but the question is a real one, and one that evades a good answer because there is so little systematic information about the size and composition of the elections workforce.

This post and future posts will provide information about the elections workforce, drawing on results from the 2023 Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) Local Election Official (LEO) Survey. We hope this will contribute to efforts to improve the size, diversity, and professionalization in that workforce, and spur other efforts to improve our knowledge base about staff to monitor progress moving forward.

Why Does the Election Workforce Matter?

The quality of American democracy and the integrity of our election system relies in large part on the efforts of the elections workforce: local elections officials (LEOs) and their staff who administer elections in the fifty states, territories, indigenous areas, and in more than ten thousand counties, townships, municipalities, and other administrative units. A long research record has shown that voters express higher confidence in our election system when they have a good voting experience and when poll workers and other election officials are knowledgeable and professional. Election officials and their staffs also act as key intermediaries between political candidates and other groups who want access to the ballot to compete for public support.

A well-trained and professional election workforce is vital to American democracy and it is encouraging to see increasing attention to harassment and turnover among staff, as well as policy and research initiatives dedicated to the issue.

How Many Staff?

As valuable as these efforts are, they are hampered by a lack of systematic information about elections staff.

One place to start would seem to be the most basic: how many elections staff are there?

That seemingly simple question was posed to EVIC in September 2023, while the 2023 LEO Survey hit the field. And it is a question that we should be able to answer since we have been asking about the size of Full Time Employees (FTEs) in elections offices since 2019.

This survey question results in this powerful figure below, showing that more than half of the elections offices in the country have zero or one full-time staff person, and 90% have 5 or fewer staff members.

We can use these responses to produce a first estimate of the total elections staff, and putting aside some details (see the Appendix), 26,824 is the answer we provided. Once we adjust for the largest jurisdictions in the country, “around 30,000” was a defensible answer.

But then research and learning intervened.

We discovered something well-known to practitioners but not brought home to us until we were in the midst of a staffing study commissioned by the State of Oregon. Asking about FTEs in a local office that administers elections will inevitably capture FTEs that work on the property recording side. In some cases, these duties are split, and LEOs engage in “staff sharing” (explicitly moving a staff member from recording over to elections during peak periods).

We asked about this in the 2023 LEO Survey, and the results showed over a quarter of offices engaged in staff sharing. The larger the office, the more common staff sharing is going on (because the smallest offices don’t have staff to “share” – everyone does everything).

A second question added to the 2023 survey tries to elicit a more precise estimate of elections staff:

“Of the full-time staff, how many are fully dedicated to elections?”

The responses to this question are quite striking when compared to the figure above. Notably:

• 32% of all jurisdictions in the country have “no full-time staff” and consequently, “zero” full-time staff dedicated to elections.
• 18% of all jurisdictions have one full-time staff member (the LEO) and half of those are not fully dedicated to elections.
• 40% of all jurisdictions have 2 – 5 staff, and 37.5% of those tell us “none” of the staff are fully dedicated to elections full-time.

There are even a small number of larger jurisdictions (100,001-250,000) that do not have a single dedicated elections specialist. Such is the reality of balancing election administration with recording, licensing, budgets, and the other myriad duties assigned to LEOs nationwide.

This question was my “lifeline” — it allowed me to adjust the staffing estimate (described in more detail in the Appendix). This is my nearly “final answer” of 16,840.43.

Add some wiggle room to adjust for the largest jurisdictions, for an ultimate answer of “an election workforce somewhere around 20,000.”

If It Is Good Enough For Horseshoes … How To Get Better Estimates of Elections Staff

Our intuition is that there are somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 elections staff nationwide, without considering additional complications like staff sharing, temporary workers, and poll workers. However, getting to that estimate required some fairly heroic assumptions.

We know that state and local governments face workforce challenges. We know that elected officials and election workers face unprecedented levels of threats and harassments for simply doing their jobs.

We believe that the research community can do better.

• EVIC can do better by improving the LEO Survey.
  We can ask more precise questions about staffing. In our defense, since the inception of the LEO Survey in 2018, we have labored to make the survey instrument short and easy to complete, avoiding anything that necessitates a LEO looking something up offline. However, conversations with practitioners have convinced us that most LEOs will have a good sense of the size of their staff, and those good senses will be better than the categories we have used in the past. Barry Burden, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin Elections Research Center has successfully used a more specific item in surveys of Wisconsin clerks that we could adapt.
  
• The Census Bureau and U.S .Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) can do better by coding election work and election workers.
  Two resources to track employment and wages in local government are the Census of Local Governments and the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. For reasons we don’t know, neither of these has a category or occupational code for elections.
  
• The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) can do better by collecting information on staff sizes and other workforce information.
  The EAC may consider collecting information on staff sizes and compensation levels, perhaps as an off-year effort separate from the biennial Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS), which is already a burdensome instrument.