New Research from USC Center for Inclusive Democracy and EVIC Collaboration on Ballot Tracking
We’re excited to share some new research from the Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID) at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and our team here at the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC).
In “Vote-by-Mail Ballot Tracking: A Multi-State Analysis of Voter Turnout and Rejection Rates”, our combined team found that voters in Georgia, Colorado and California who used a free vote-by-mail ballot tracking tool during the 2022 midterms reported higher confidence in the electoral process than non-tool users.
This study was led by CID with Sol Price School of Public Policy Assistant Research Professor Mindy Romero, PhD, a political sociologist and the founder and director of the CID, serving as the study’s Principal Investigator.
EVIC’s founder and director Paul Gronke, PhD, political scientist at Reed College, and Lisa A. Bryant, PhD, political scientist, department chair, and 2024-2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow (Carnegie Corporation of New York) at California State University, Fresno focused on the instrument creation and surveying aspect of this project.
CID Research Associate Anna (Annie) Meier and EVIC Senior Program Advisor Michelle M. Shafer also contributed to this work.
Support for this project was provided by the Election Trust Initiative.
Read the University of Southern California press release about this report here, and read the report itself here.
LEO Retirements and Departures: Data from the 2022 and 2020 Surveys
Paul Manson, Research Director, and Paul Gronke, Director
Elections & Voting Information Center
Many in the elections and democracy space are concerned about the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise if many elections officials decide to depart from the field in response to increasing workloads, higher job stress, and a new environment of abuse, threats, and harassment.
We want to be mindful that departures and retirements after a Presidential and midterm may be a normal phenomena — LEOs over the years have told us that the period after a federal election cycle is a common time that an official, and their staff, will target for departures.
EVIC has been collecting survey data on planned retirements and departures since 2020. In each year, we asked respondents whether or not they were eligible to retire, and if so, were they planning on retiring before the 2024 election. For those respondents who were not eligible to retire, we also asked whether they had plans to leave the field.
In terms of eligibility, over one-third of officials reported they were eligible in 2020, and this number declined to 30% in 2022 — as would be expected if there was a wave of retirements after 2020. It’s also important to note that retirement after a presidential year is a normal phenomenon, and with no baseline comparisons, we don’t know if 2020 levels exceeded what would normally be expected.
We discovered that 13% planned to retire before 2024 (or almost half of those that are eligible), and about half of these respondents plan to retire this year. These numbers are high when compared to at least two benchmarks — the percent of the US workforce that retires annually (2%) or the federal workforce that retires annually (3.2%).
Finally, for those who were not eligible to retire, we asked if they were nonetheless considering leaving their position as a local elections official within the next two years. When we combine the planned retirements with the planned departures, we find that 21% of officials were planning to leave in 2020 and 18% were planning to leave in 2022.
Retirements and departures are very difficult to track because there is no comprehensive list of election officials in the United States. If such a list existed and was regularly updated, it may be possible to get a better purchase on retirements, departures, and lateral movements within the field, and over time in response to stressors.
Our results may be as good as we can get right now, and rely on survey self-reports. If accurate, and 18% of LEOs depart prior to 2024, that translates into anywhere between 1600 to 2000 LEOs.
By any measure, that’s a lot of expertise and knowledge that would need to be replaced in an area so critical to our democracy.
(The raw frequencies for these questions and the question wording can be found on our LEO Survey Page.)
Elections in the Crucible: Stewarding Democracy Under Extreme Events
Paul Manson ’01 and Heather Creek
Election administrators face many headwinds in 2020. The confluence of an international pandemic and a historic presidential election has created numerous challenges for local election officials (LEOs). These administrators have navigated rapidly changing state rules and expectations about early and absentee voting, changes to the availability of traditional polling places and poll workers, and voters eager to participate in the 2020 election but with many questions of how and when to vote safely.
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The Portland City Council Position 4 Race: Will We See a 2016 Repeat?
The contest for position 4 in Portland City Council is highly competitive, and recent polling shows the challenger, Mingus Mapps with a nine point lead over Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, but with 40% of the electorate reporting that they are undecided, this race will go all the way to the wire.
In our last post, “Visualizing the Position 4 City Council Race,” we conducted a geo-spatial analysis of the May 2020 primary to try to understand the candidate dynamics in a competitive primary. The data we examined showed that Mapps has some advantages in the November run. Precincts that showed comparatively higher levels of support for Sam Adams were more similar to precincts that showed higher level of support for Mapps than those which were centers of strength for Eudaly.
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By Canyon Foot ’20, Paul Manson ’01, Paul Gronke, and Jay Lee ’19
Motivation:
Canyon Foot and Paul Gronke have recently posted two analyses of the Portland City Council races. For these analyses, we hoped to understand the spatial and demographic variation of support for City Council and other contests defined by the geographic and political boundaries in Multnomah County.
What we are doing: Spatial joins between Census Tracts and precincts:
In order to answer these questions, researchers often rely on estimates produced by the US Census using the American Community Survey (ACS). Unlike the Decennial Census, the ACS samples a percentage of households each year to ask about detailed demographics including income, employment, housing, etc. These are then aggregated at various geographies from the block group up to counties, metropolitan areas and states. These smaller units have smaller samples, and thus more error. As such, researchers often must work with a larger area because of its greater sample size (and smaller error).
New Research Relating Partisanship and Automatic Voter Registration
Emergent research relating partisanship, perceptions of election legitimacy, and Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) from Prof. Paul Gronke, Christopher B. Mann, and Natalie Adona.
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Reform from the Trenches: How Local Election Officials Weigh the Vote By Mail Option
COVID-19 has forced much of the country to reevaluate the way it does business, and elections are no exception. We’ve already seen primaries postponed in 15 states and cancelled in New York. Wisconsin’s in-person primary at the start of April saw shortages of polling places and poll workers, as well as difficulties managing a tenfold increase in absentee ballot requests. All of this has unfolded in an atmosphere of partisan bickering about how to best assure a safe, secure, and accessible November election.
While many decisions about elections are being made at the state (or even national) level, the job of implementing these changes and administering elections falls on the roughly 8,000 local election officials (LEOs) across the country, a group that we have called the “stewards of democracy.”
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In case you missed our October 8, 2024 webinar “The Impact of EVIC’s Local Election Official Survey Program on Election Science Research and Election Administration” – or want to re-watch this fantastic discussion – the conversation between EVIC’s Founder and Director and Reed College Political Scientist Paul Gronke, PhD, and 2024-2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellows and Election Science researchers Lisa A. Bryant, PhD (California State University, Fresno), and Mara Suttmann-Lea, PhD, Connecticut College), is posted to our new EVIC YouTube channel at this link.
We encourage you to listen to this excellent discussion that took place on campus at Reed College on the morning of October 8th with webinar attendees from across the US and around the word listening live on Zoom. And please share it with your colleagues!
The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) is a non-partisan academic research center with our research leads co-located at Portland State University and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Led by Founder and Director Paul Gronke, PhD, and Research Director Paul Manson, PhD, EVIC searches for common sense, non-partisan solutions to identified problems in election administration backed by solid empirical evidence.
EVIC’s marquee project is the annual Local Election Official (LEO) Survey which our research team has been undertaking since 2018. The 2024 EVIC LEO Survey – generously funded by Democracy Fund and the Election Trust Initiative – is currently underway and still fielding as of the date of this post. We encourage all LEOs who have received a survey (not every LEO receives a survey every year) to fill it out either online or via paper copy and return it to us. We will be analyzing results soon and beginning to share them in early December. Stay tuned!
If you have any questions on the LEO Survey, or anything EVIC-related, please reach out to me at shaferm@reed.edu. Thank you!