By Paul Gronke, PhD | Paul Manson, PhD
As our Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) readers know, the administration of elections in the United States is a decentralized system with a complex set of diverse institutional arrangements that vary across states and sub-state jurisdictions.
Nearly 8,000 officials spread across 50 states and the District of Columbia hold many titles. They are selected by many different methods and have varying degrees of autonomy from their states (and their counties in the instance of villages, cities, etc., who conduct elections in Michigan, Wisconsin, and New England states). And, of course, they operate in very different political, demographic, and geographical environments.
In the face of this diversity, there are common features, predictable challenges, and a shared professional commitment that connects officials from the smallest Midwestern or New England township to densely populated urban and sprawling metropolitan suburban areas.
Since 2018, EVIC at Reed College has created and continuously evolved its often quoted and highly anticipated annual Survey of Local Election Officials (LEOs). And today, after the dust begins to settle on Election Day 2023 and election officials throughout the country shift focus to the 2024 primaries and presidential election, our team is proud to share our 2023 LEO Survey results and report.
The 2023 LEO Survey was conducted during the off-year (although there is no true “off-year” for election officials) by EVIC in collaboration with SSRS, our skilled survey administration partner and designer of the infographics used in our 2023 report.
In response to feedback from the elections community, researchers, and others working in the democracy space, we learned that a major challenge faced by almost all offices is summed up by one term: resiliency. In this turbulent time of rapid change, competitive elections, and increased public scrutiny, how have these offices adapted and performed?
Key takeaways from the 2023 LEO Survey include:
- Job satisfaction remains high. LEOs say that “integrity”, “service”, and “community” come to mind when they think about what they like about their jobs. When asked what they don’t like about their jobs, “misinformation”, “politics”, and “stress” are at the top of their minds.
- Peak elections workload forces most officials to stretch to their limits, or go beyond them. On a percentage basis, the increased workload during “peak” election season is truly extraordinary – from 50% to 535% higher hours worked during elections as compared to the rest of the year. This is dependent on the size of the jurisdiction.
- Turnover is twice as high as found in prior LEO surveys. However, loss of institutional knowledge may be tempered by lateral movement. For example, the average LEO in the largest-sized (>100,000) jurisdictional category has been in their current position for only 5 years, but has 16 years of experience in elections. We need to know not just about when LEOs depart, but we need to know about who replaces a LEO when they depart.
- Staffing and hiring continue to be a challenge for many election offices. Barriers to hiring include job classifications that have fallen out of sync with the skill sets currently needed to administer elections as well as non-competitive pay. LEOs are divided as to whether the political environment is a barrier.
- Misinformation is a concern among most LEOs. LEOs in smaller jurisdictions rely primarily on face-to-face communication to counter misinformation, while LEOs in larger jurisdictions rely on a broad suite of communications channels that includes social media, websites, email, etc.
On the 2023 LEO Survey page, you will find our report on the high-level survey findings. And for those of you who may be academic researchers or other data geeks (and we mean that in a good way!), you will find the following 2023 resources available to download and comb through, including the 2023 web-based instrument, crosstabs, and codebooks, as well as the codebooks, crosstabs, and questionnaires from our 2018-2022 studies.
The EVIC LEO Surveys also collect metrics to monitor the environment in which these public servants serve, their attitudes toward their work, and the situations and circumstances in which they find themselves. Since the 2020 election, the EVIC team has examined LEO perception of threats and harassment inside and outside of their workplace and the effects of this situation over time.
The 2023 LEO Survey was generously supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) with additional survey communications support from the Election Trust Initiative to enable us to produce such high-quality infographics.The inaugural LEO Survey of 2018 through the 2022 Survey was funded by our collaborative partner on those efforts – Democracy Fund – without whose support this idea would not have become a reality. In addition to our current and past survey funders and their respective team members (way too many to name), we’d like to recognize our external team at SSRS and our current internal EVIC team: Jay Lee (Reed ‘19), Michelle Shafer, Simon Ahn (Reed ‘24) and Abby Durant (Reed ‘24), for their extremely valuable contributions to the success of this effort.
And last – but most importantly – we thank election officials all over the country in almost every state, for taking the time to thoughtfully respond to our survey and help us in sharing results.
If you are an academic researcher who would like to work with our data, a leader of a national, regional, or state association of election officials interested in having a presentation on the 2023 LEO Survey at your next meeting, or a member of the media interested in writing about the 2023 Survey, please contact EVIC Senior Program Manager Michelle Shafer via email.
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.
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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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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