The Impact of Public Records Requests on Local Election Officials: Findings from the 2023 EVIC LEO Survey

By Paul Gronke and Paul Manson

Kyle Yoder and April Tan of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) released a focus brief on the use and abuse of public records requests, how these requests have impacted local elections offices, and what legislative solutions have been shown to ease the burden placed on local election officials (LEOs).

The research team at the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) has been tracking public records requests in our 2023 EVIC LEO Survey, part of a broader investigation into workloads, staffing, and administrative burdens. The survey provides additional evidence about the dramatic increase in workload resulting from public records requests, particularly in medium-sized and larger jurisdictions where these requests seem to be concentrated.

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The Elections Workforce: How Many Election Workers are there Nationwide?

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.

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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.

“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.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/14/tarrant-county-elections-administrator-finalist/