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.
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingBy 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).
Emergent research relating partisanship, perceptions of election legitimacy, and Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) from Prof. Paul Gronke, Christopher B. Mann, and Natalie Adona.
Continue readingCOVID-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.”
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
As we learn all the ways the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting our lives, one looming concern is our elections. Sixteen states have already postponed in-person primaries to protect voters from gatherings that could expose them and poll workers to the spread of the virus. This has in turn resulted in a growing call for legislative action to address the health threat created by in-person balloting.
As we look ahead to the upcoming primaries and the general election this fall, there are a series of possible election tools that might mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. One of these tools is vote by mail (VBM), which increasingly is simply vote at home with most voters in some states personally returning ballots to drop boxes.
What should election administrators worry about if this shift proceeds? What are the possible challenges or barriers to running a new vote by mail election? And what can be learned from states that have already shifted to this system?
To answer these questions, we turn to one of the country’s most experienced administrators running a full by-mail election system, Multnomah County, Oregon’s Director of Elections, Tim Scott.
Continue reading
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.)