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/

Survey Results from Democracy Fund / Reed College Survey of American Election Officials

Professor Paul Gronke was honored to be part of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2022 Post-Election Summit in Washington DC. This was an inspiring event that brought together elections officials, researchers, lawyers, journalists, policymakers, and others in the elections and democracy space to discuss lessons learned from 2022 and a path forward through 2024 to ensure safe, secure, accessible, and well-funded elections.

That latter point — funding — was the biggest takeaway from the meeting. As many panelists stressed, including secretaries of state, state elections directors, and state legislators — the window for funding the 2024 election is right now, in 2023. If funding doesn’t come out of the upcoming state and federal legislative sessions, then additional funding is likely to be too little and too late. Elections officials are already starting to think about 2024 preparations, and integrating new systems, new staff, and new administrative models in response to funding needs to take place this year.

EVIC presented results from our 2022 survey and could barely manage the traffic at our poster! It was heartening to see all the interest and comments and of course suggestions for new topics in upcoming surveys.

The poster is available by clicking on this link for a PDF if the image below is too small on your screen.

The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College hosted a second webinar on October 27th, 2021 sponsored by the Stewards of Democracy Initiative (SDI). The webinar, titled “Stewards of Democracy Initiative: Adaptation, Adjustment, and Learning from the 2020 Election, was attended by 70 election community stakeholders including academic researchers, state and local election officials, nonprofit representatives, election technology providers, and the media. 

SDI is a multi-pronged collaborative research effort of EVIC consisting of webinar conversations, a cross-sector book publication, and a research convening of election science-focused academic researchers, local election official practitioners, and other election community stakeholders.

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The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College launched a new research effort, the Stewards of Democracy Initiative (SDI), on July 27th, 2021. An inaugural webinar introducing SDI was attended by 77 election community stakeholders including academic researchers, state and local election officials, nonprofit representatives, election technology providers, and the media.”

SDI is a multi-pronged collaborative research effort of EVIC consisting of webinar conversations, a cross-sector book publication, and a research convening of election science-focused academic researchers, local election official practitioners, and other election community stakeholders.

Continue reading