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. You can access the report below.
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.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/14/tarrant-county-elections-administrator-finalist/
“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.”
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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By Malen Cuturic ‘23 (exp.), EVIC Data Science Research Assistant and Paul Gronke, EVIC Director
Among the historic and unprecedented features of the November 2020 election was an enormous shift in the rate of voting by mail, from 21% in 2016 to 46% in 2020. As Nate Persily and Charles Stewart note, part of the “miracle” of 2020 was that local election administrators managed to adapt so rapidly to the demand for alternatives to in-person voting in the face of a global pandemic.
Continue readingThe 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.
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The U.S. Census Bureau just released data tables from their 2020 Voting and Registration Supplement, a biannual supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey that focuses on election related topics – particularly in the wake of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. These tables show what we’ve known intuitively and from other sources for a while: vote-by-mail rates were higher in 2020 than any year previously, as states across the country updated their absentee voting policies and voters adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
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