NEW REPORT: Today’s Election Administration Landscape: Findings from the 2024 Elections & Voting Information Center Local Election Official Survey

EVIC’s new report highlights the challenges and successes facing America’s election officials

(EVIC PRESS RELEASE) Portland, OR— February 6, 2025 Today, the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) announced immediate availability of “Today’s Election Administration Landscape: Findings from the 2024 EVIC Local Election Official Survey” on the 2024 EVIC LEO Survey section of organization’s website at evic.reed.edu

Local Election Officials (LEOs) are “stewards of democracy,” positioned at the frontline of elections in the United States. They ensure fair, free, accessible, and secure elections. The annual EVIC Local Election Official (LEO) Survey captures the

challenges and successes facing election officials each year. In 2024, EVIC heard from over 650 LEOs nationwide.

“LEOs continue to manage the new obstacles that come with each election,” said report co-author Paul Manson, PhD, EVIC Research Director and Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Public Service at Portland State University. “They have endured challenges from political forces, local finance and budget changes, and shifting state election policy – and as stewards of democracy, they continue to serve voters with dedication.”

The 2024 election administration experience was relatively uneventful compared to past elections. While the election results were rapid and clear, the authors share a note of caution.

“However, we are concerned that ongoing stressors will result in accelerated departures from election offices,” said report co-author Paul Gronke, PhD, EVIC Director and Political Science Professor at Reed College. “Hiring difficulties also suggest that these pressures are not limited to the chief local election official and create challenges at all levels of election offices.”

EVIC’s 2024 report begins with the challenges LEOs face themselves, including job satisfaction and experience with threats and harassment. The next section describes the policy and organizational challenges offices confront, including hiring staff and funding operations. Finally, the report concludes with LEOs’ perspectives on the performance of US elections and their role in voter education and engagement.

The 2024 EVIC report’s key findings show that LEO job satisfaction has stabilized at 77% after declining from 91% in 2022. Job satisfaction is highest among those serving the largest jurisdictions. Increasing workloads, ongoing threats and harassment, and shifting policy requirements are continuing concerns.

Subset of Key Findings: LEO Job Satisfaction

EVIC’s key job satisfaction findings from the 2024 LEO Survey include the following:

  • Overall, 77% of local election officials are satisfied with their jobs.
  • Overwhelmingly, LEOs share a sense of empowerment and confidence in their work.
  • Job satisfaction has dropped 20 percentage points since the 2020 election and has not shown much sign of recovery.
  • Key measures of aspects of job satisfaction show more significant declines.
  • Following the 2020 election, the percentage of LEOs who would recommend that a child pursue election work dropped in half, from 40% to 20%.
  • “Respect from Other County Officials” shows a positive return to 2020 levels. 
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About the 2024 EVIC Local Election Official Survey

EVIC’s marquee project is the annual Local Election Official (LEO) Survey that the research team has been undertaking since 2018 with the 2024 survey being the sixth in the series. The 2024 EVIC Local Election Official Survey was administered by EVIC at the Center for Public Service, Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University

The survey was fielded from August – October 2024. EVIC allowed respondents to complete the survey online or by returning a print survey. This multiple-method approach increases the survey response rate and increases the generalizability of the results. The total number of responses for the 2024 LEO Survey is 659 out of 3105 sampled, resulting in a response rate of 21.2%. 

The 2024 EVIC LEO Survey project was led by EVIC Director Paul Gronke, PhD, Reed College Political Science Professor, and Research Director Paul Manson, PhD, Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Public Service at Portland State University. The 2024 EVIC LEO Survey was funded by Democracy Fund and the Election Trust Initiative

For more information on the 2024 EVIC LEO Survey including crosstabs, codebook, instrument and infographics, please visit evic.reed.edu/leo_survey_project

About the Elections & Voting Information Center 

The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) is a Portland, Oregon-based non-partisan academic research center that searches for common sense solutions to identified problems in election administration backed by solid empirical evidence. EVIC is led by Founder and Director Paul Gronke, PhD, (Reed College) and Research Director Paul Manson, PhD, (Portland State University). For more information on EVIC, please visit evic.reed.edu

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Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) |Portland, Oregon
Media Contact: Michelle Shafer | shaferm@reed.edu | michelle@magentasage.com

Updates on City of Portland, Oregon Ranked Choice Voting Results

In a previous post we dove into the initial election results from Portland’s Ranked Choice Voting elections. Each night the Multnomah County Elections office is updating their RCV election results page dand we will update visualizations here.

Things to Keep an Eye Out For

We don’t know how the remaining 130,000 ballots (as of 7:00am on November 7) will change results. They are being processed in the order they were received, and so we are unsure if there is a geographic or any other pattern. But here are the things we are looking out for:

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Making Sense of the 2024 City of Portland Elections

Updates on results will be posted here nightly!

Tonight Portland voters will learn a lot about the new voting system adopted as a part of charter reform. The Mayor, Auditor, and Council will all be selected with ranked preferences form voters. The Council is the unique story here as three winners will be selected from these rankings in each of the four new districts.

We are sharing some initial analyses here to explore the patterns from these elections. But first an important note: These are just preliminary results. The Multnomah County Elections Division is releasing full tabulations each evening. For the next few days ballots will continue to be returned to the County, resulting in updates that may change these results. This is a disclaimer one should remember when also reviewing national returns in general! With that note, lets see what the voters have shared so far.

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An Update: Tracking Ranked Choice Voting Results in the City of Portland

Later tonight, the Multnomah County Elections Division will release new results for the City of Portland races here in Oregon. I will post our first visualizations here on our Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) website blog.

We noticed last night that the percentage of ballots processed in time for the first preliminary results were lower than we felt comfortable presenting. Initially looking at those data though, we found some promising patterns in terms of how voters were managing choices. District 1 results in particular seem to be made up of a lot of ballots that have not been processed yet. Preliminary results last night showed about 50% less total ballots in District 1 compared to the other districts. That gave us reason to pause on data analysis.

Below are the results for the Mayor’s race – which has more votes as a citywide race. Here we see the outsider Keith Wilson besting three sitting city commissioners.

We will publish an update tonight around 6:30pm Pacific, so be on the lookout! In the interim, if you did not yet read our primer on the topic, take a look prior to this evening.

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