Study: Election staffing lags behind growth of Oregon voterbase
Coverage by Nathan Wilk of KLCC Public Radio of the 2023 Oregon Staffing Study.
“It’s a flashing red light on the dashboard,” said Paul Manson, the Research Director with Reed College’s Elections and Voting Information Center.
“We had one jurisdiction share with us that they’re being outbid by the fast food companies,” said Manson. “More common too, we heard they’re even being outbid by other county governments.”
Julia Shumway of The Capitol Chronicle covered today’s release of the 2023 Oregon Election Officials Staffing Study.
Key quote from Dr. Paul Manson:
“The cloud over all of this is the political environment to some degree or the perceptions,” said Paul Manson, a Portland State University political science professor and the center’s research director. “(In) one out of five of our interviews, we had to pause because it was just too emotional.”
One of the clerks interviewed no longer feels comfortable telling strangers what their job is because they’re scared of the reaction, Manson said. Concerns about threats and harassment also make it harder to recruit employees.
Job postings, description and compensation don’t match the current job requirements for county election workers, Manson said. They’re usually classified as clerical jobs, but election workers now have to do more outreach and public engagement, spending time debunking misinformation and talking to adversarial voters. One Oregon official interviewed for the study noted they would make more working at the In-N-Out Burger across the street than in the elections office.
New EVIC Report on Oregon Local Election Official Staffing
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!
Garcia was particularly lauded by election officials across the country for his engagement with “election deniers” in his county, said Paul Gronke, Elections & Voting Information Center director and a professor of political science at Reed College.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/14/tarrant-county-elections-administrator-finalist/
“It is no simple task to administer elections in a large and diverse county like Tarrant, especially as we rapidly approach what is sure to be a highly competitive presidential election,” Gronke, who leads an annual survey of local election officials across the country, a source of data on the profession, said in a statement to Votebeat. “I sincerely hope that a new administrator is found who has the same level of expertise, respect, and ability to reach across political divides as Heider Garcia.”
Nice history and overview of the system, by Jen Kirby:
Oregon already votes by mail. Here’s what it can teach us in 2020.
“It’s possible but unlikely that states such as Arizona, which already have a large percentage of voters on a list to automatically receive a ballot, could expand the practice, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College and director of the Early Voting Information Center.”
“Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon, said the counterfeit ballot theory was from ‘the world of fantasy.’”
Professor Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College, quipped in the New York Times:
“Everyone’s focusing on the rate of voting by mail, which is going to easily double what it was in 2016 — somewhere north of 80 million ballots…But people aren’t paying attention to what might happen if there’s a spike in the pandemic or a shortage of poll workers and there’s a last-minute reduction in in-person voting.”
Gronke’s comments on the nationwide conversation on voting amidst the COVID-19 pandemic pivots our thinking towards issues of capacity. Should Local Election Officials become unable to work due to COVID-19, already stressed election districts could experience unprecedented difficulty conducting the election.
Imaginative solutions backed by a flock of volunteers will be necessary to ensure a safe and successful election this November.
Read the full story here.
