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.
Continue readingBy Paul Gronke, PhD | Paul Manson, PhD
As our Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) readers know, the administration of elections in the United States is a decentralized system with a complex set of diverse institutional arrangements that vary across states and sub-state jurisdictions.
Nearly 8,000 officials spread across 50 states and the District of Columbia hold many titles. They are selected by many different methods and have varying degrees of autonomy from their states (and their counties in the instance of villages, cities, etc., who conduct elections in Michigan, Wisconsin, and New England states). And, of course, they operate in very different political, demographic, and geographical environments.
In the face of this diversity, there are common features, predictable challenges, and a shared professional commitment that connects officials from the smallest Midwestern or New England township to densely populated urban and sprawling metropolitan suburban areas.
Since 2018, EVIC at Reed College has created and continuously evolved its often quoted and highly anticipated annual Survey of Local Election Officials (LEOs). And today, after the dust begins to settle on Election Day 2023 and election officials throughout the country shift focus to the 2024 primaries and presidential election, our team is proud to share our 2023 LEO Survey results and report.
The 2023 LEO Survey was conducted during the off-year (although there is no true “off-year” for election officials) by EVIC in collaboration with SSRS, our skilled survey administration partner and designer of the infographics used in our 2023 report.
In response to feedback from the elections community, researchers, and others working in the democracy space, we learned that a major challenge faced by almost all offices is summed up by one term: resiliency. In this turbulent time of rapid change, competitive elections, and increased public scrutiny, how have these offices adapted and performed?
Key takeaways from the 2023 LEO Survey include:
- Job satisfaction remains high. LEOs say that “integrity”, “service”, and “community” come to mind when they think about what they like about their jobs. When asked what they don’t like about their jobs, “misinformation”, “politics”, and “stress” are at the top of their minds.
- Peak elections workload forces most officials to stretch to their limits, or go beyond them. On a percentage basis, the increased workload during “peak” election season is truly extraordinary – from 50% to 535% higher hours worked during elections as compared to the rest of the year. This is dependent on the size of the jurisdiction.
- Turnover is twice as high as found in prior LEO surveys. However, loss of institutional knowledge may be tempered by lateral movement. For example, the average LEO in the largest-sized (>100,000) jurisdictional category has been in their current position for only 5 years, but has 16 years of experience in elections. We need to know not just about when LEOs depart, but we need to know about who replaces a LEO when they depart.
- Staffing and hiring continue to be a challenge for many election offices. Barriers to hiring include job classifications that have fallen out of sync with the skill sets currently needed to administer elections as well as non-competitive pay. LEOs are divided as to whether the political environment is a barrier.
- Misinformation is a concern among most LEOs. LEOs in smaller jurisdictions rely primarily on face-to-face communication to counter misinformation, while LEOs in larger jurisdictions rely on a broad suite of communications channels that includes social media, websites, email, etc.
On the 2023 LEO Survey page, you will find our report on the high-level survey findings. And for those of you who may be academic researchers or other data geeks (and we mean that in a good way!), you will find the following 2023 resources available to download and comb through, including the 2023 web-based instrument, crosstabs, and codebooks, as well as the codebooks, crosstabs, and questionnaires from our 2018-2022 studies.
The EVIC LEO Surveys also collect metrics to monitor the environment in which these public servants serve, their attitudes toward their work, and the situations and circumstances in which they find themselves. Since the 2020 election, the EVIC team has examined LEO perception of threats and harassment inside and outside of their workplace and the effects of this situation over time.
The 2023 LEO Survey was generously supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) with additional survey communications support from the Election Trust Initiative to enable us to produce such high-quality infographics.The inaugural LEO Survey of 2018 through the 2022 Survey was funded by our collaborative partner on those efforts – Democracy Fund – without whose support this idea would not have become a reality. In addition to our current and past survey funders and their respective team members (way too many to name), we’d like to recognize our external team at SSRS and our current internal EVIC team: Jay Lee (Reed ‘19), Michelle Shafer, Simon Ahn (Reed ‘24) and Abby Durant (Reed ‘24), for their extremely valuable contributions to the success of this effort.
And last – but most importantly – we thank election officials all over the country in almost every state, for taking the time to thoughtfully respond to our survey and help us in sharing results.
If you are an academic researcher who would like to work with our data, a leader of a national, regional, or state association of election officials interested in having a presentation on the 2023 LEO Survey at your next meeting, or a member of the media interested in writing about the 2023 Survey, please contact EVIC Senior Program Manager Michelle Shafer via email.
We are excited to announce a new EVIC report on Oregon Local Election Official Staffing Commissioned by the Elections Division of the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office
Today, Paul Gronke and Paul Manson testified before the Oregon House Interim Committee on Rules regarding the “Oregon County Election Staffing Research Study” that EVIC prepared under their direction as commissioned by the Elections Division of the Oregon Secretary of State’s office to assess the staffing challenges faced by local election officials (LEOs) in Oregon.
EVIC’s report summarizes the findings from this study where LEOs from Oregon’s counties were interviewed for an average of 60-90 minutes, resulting in a combined 46 hours of interviews.
The Election Division of the Oregon Secretary of State’s office issued a press release today on this work. “Oregon County Clerks Struggling with Staffing, Retention, and Recruitment in the Midst of a Toxic Political Environment” can be viewed here.
In addition to the report and press release, you can access the joint written testimony of Paul Gronke and Paul Manson for EVIC here as well as the slide deck used at today’s hearing.
Today’s meeting agenda is located here.
All of the aforementioned meeting materials are located in one place here: You can also find the video of today’s session posted there.
Please share this important work and reach out if you have any questions!
EVIC STANDS WITH BLACK AMERICANS
In light of recent unconscionable acts of police brutality, EVIC stands in solidarity with Black Americans.
We further affirm their right to equal access to the ballot. Responding to a history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement, we believe that a free, fair, and secure election system; community outreach; and ongoing research is necessary to ensure equity in the voting process.
We are using these recent events to learn, reflect, and reexamine our beliefs and values to ensure that we are foregrounding justice in our election administration work. Together, we can encourage an election system that supports racial equity and anti-racism.
Emergent research relating partisanship, perceptions of election legitimacy, and Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) from Prof. Paul Gronke, Christopher B. Mann, and Natalie Adona.
Continue reading(Crossposted from https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2020/gronkewinscarnegie.html)
Reed College Professor of Political Science Paul Gronke was selected as part of the 2020 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. The prestigious award supports high-caliber scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, making it possible for recipients to continue their research on pressing issues and cultural transitions affecting U.S. citizens at home and abroad. Professor Gronke was recognized for his scholarship on election security and accessibility.
Continue readingA new report released today by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College provides a roadmap to state election officials when developing a systematic election-performance auditing process for the State of Oregon. The report is a collaboration between Reed College and Caltech, with funding provided by the Oregon Secretary of State, Elections Division.
“The report demonstrates the integrity of Oregon’s registration system, but also that the system needs to be modernized to be able to take advantage of modern technology tools and analysis. The performance audit process innovated by Caltech is an invaluable tool for election administrators to pressure test registration and balloting systems.”
— Paul Gronke, Director, Early Voting Information Center
A new piece in Belt Magazine maps out challenges facing the national call for expanding vote by mail. EVIC’s Director, Dr. Gronke notes the transition is a challenge akin to moving from “Walmart to Amazon” in short period of time. Along with other election administration scholars, this piece surveys the questions election administrators face. Read more here: “Democracy by Mail.”