Stephen Richer has never run a presidential election before.
He oversees voting as the county recorder in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa County, and took office in 2021.
Yet as November approaches in the closely scrutinized swing state, Richer finds himself looking across the profession and realizing he’s essentially an old-timer.
“There are 15 recorders in 15 counties … and I’m already, I think, fifth-most senior or fourth-most senior of the 15,” Richer told NPR recently, at an event hosted by the Campaign Legal Center. “So, yeah, [turnover] is real.”
A new report out Tuesday confirms that, and provides the most in-depth nationwide analysis yet of the people at the heart of the democratic process: the thousands of election officials across the U.S. that administer voting.
It’s been clear for some time that the work environment in these jobs was becoming unsustainable. Threats and harassment have become commonplace since the flurry of voting lies that followed Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, while at the same time, the actual job duties required have been steadily growing more complex.
And this new report, authored by researchers at UCLA and the Bipartisan Policy Center, confirms people are now leaving the profession at a faster rate than any point in the previous two decades.
But the report also adds new context to the phenomenon.
A 20-year take on turnover
Notably, the report took a long view to the turnover question and found that while attrition did increase in the time following 2020, it’s been slowly increasing for years — meaning “election administration might be more equipped to respond to it than previously speculated.”
“Turnover is not a new phenomenon,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center Elections Project. “It is a long-term issue with roots in chronic challenges facing the election administration workforce.”
Those include chronically low pay and resources, as well as rapidly changing laws that often add new responsibilities or pressure onto election officials.
Orey worked with Joshua Ferrer and Daniel Thompson of UCLA to analyze a novel dataset that included more than 18,000 local election officials across more than 6,000 election jurisdictions.
The researchers measured whether a local election office changed hands over a 4-year cycle. In 2022 (the most recent year with complete data), the turnover rate was 39%, compared to 28% in 2004.
In recent years, as the attrition began to snowball, experts worried the impact on 2024 could be disastrous.
New election officials tend to make more mistakes, and conspiracy theories about voting tend to focus on honest mishaps to try to build a false narrative that voting more broadly can’t be trusted.
But Orey says this new report should calm some of those fears, because the officials replacing those leaving were also found to have extensive experience working in the field.
“One thing that was really comforting about this report was that while we have seen slight increases in turnover in recent years, the experience levels of incoming officials is quite high,” Orey said.
On average, incoming officials were found to have eight years of experience working in elections. And in larger jurisdictions with more than 100,000 voters, which in recent years have felt the brunt of misinformation as well as turnover struggles, incoming officials were found to have an average of 11 years of experience.
“These folks have experience, maybe not as a chief election official, but potentially as a deputy or working in the office. So they know what it’s like to run an election, and we’re confident in their preparedness going into November,” Orey said. “This report was a lot more comforting than I expected it to be.”
She added that, provided governments supply the resources and training for new officials to be successful, turnover can also provide a good opportunity to diversify the voting landscape. In 2023, the most reputable survey of lead election officials estimated the workforce to be 92% white, with the majority of officials also older than 50 years old.
“Turnover is a healthy part of maintaining a young and diverse workforce, something that the election workforce has honestly struggled to maintain in the past,” Orey said.
Turnover has spiked in battleground states
The new report also found that turnover affected election offices regardless of political lean and geography but that it starkly increased in competitive states after 2020.
In North Carolina, the executive director of the state’s board of elections spoke out last month about the turnover trend she’s seen there.
“In five years of tracking this information, we’ve had 58 changes in county election directors. In some of these counties, in this period of time, they will be on their third directors,” said Karen Brinson Bell, North Carolina’s lead voting official. “We are seeing an exodus from this profession across the country.”
Bell said local voting officials have had to become cybersecurity and physical security experts in addition to their normal job duties, without being compensated for those extra responsibilities.
“It’s still a work environment where a lot of times these folks are paid at a level of administrative work — not to disparage administrative work — but these jobs are more complex than administrative work,” Bell said. “Days of old, yes. We sat at a typewriter and typed up voter registration cards.
“That is no longer the case.”
Transcript:
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Since 2020, voting officials across the country have faced pressure, threats and harassment. And new data out today finds that many of those officials have reached a breaking point. They’re now leaving their jobs at a faster rate than any time in the past two decades. NPR’s Miles Parks covers voting, and he got first access to this new data. Miles, thanks for being here.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Ari, thanks for having me.
SHAPIRO: What does this show about turnover when it comes to voting officials – how bad is it?
PARKS: So turnover is at a higher rate right now than at any point since at least 2000. This is something we have heard about anecdotally from different states over the last few years. But this new data from researchers at UCLA and the Bipartisan Policy Center is the most in-depth nationwide analysis that we’ve had yet. And what it shows is that local election offices in 2022 – which is the most – the year we have the most recent full data – that they were leaving their job at close to a 40% clip. The data basically looked at – did this election office change hands in the last four years? And the researchers also took a longer view to basically say, how is this compared to numbers previously? In 2004, it was about 28%. It ticked up every couple years, and then 2020 really supercharged it. Here’s Rachel Orey from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
RACHEL OREY: Turnover is not a new phenomenon. It is a long-term issue with roots in chronic challenges facing the election administration workforce.
PARKS: Some of those challenges include chronically low pay and resources as well as rapidly changing job descriptions. The threat environment that has been layered on top of that is essentially like a straw that broke the camel’s back.
SHAPIRO: Hmm. Does the report get into where the turnover is most pronounced and whether it’s connected to partisanship or geography at all?
PARKS: So partisanship and geography don’t seem to play a huge role here. But one thing the researchers did note is that turnover spiked after 2020, specifically in competitive states, which we know are also the places where the harassment and threats have really centered. It is hard to overstate just how much the lies about voting in 2020 changed the jobs for election administrators in states that are specifically closely contested. I was talking recently to Derek Bowens, who runs elections in Durham County, N.C., and he told me his office hasn’t really dealt much with threats yet. But because North Carolina is competitive, it just feels like a matter of time.
DEREK BOWENS: We have honestly been fortunate in our office not to have dealt with a lot of that. But I think – I hate to say this, but I think that will change for us, given the political makeup of our county and also the state that we’re in.
PARKS: That sort of kind of looking over your shoulder is not a sustainable work environment. North Carolina’s lead voting official just a couple weeks ago said they’ve had more than 50 county election directors leave their jobs since 2019…
SHAPIRO: Wow.
PARKS: …And some counties are on their third election directors in just the last few years.
SHAPIRO: That’s a staggering number. Well, what does this mean for 2024? The general election is right around the corner, and a lot of voting officials are new to the job.
PARKS: Yeah. And this is something experts have been really worried about the last few years because new voting officials obviously make more mistakes than more seasoned voting officials. And misinformation around election seizes on those sorts of honest mistakes to try to build this narrative that voting, more broadly, can’t be trusted.
But this new report actually provides some good news in that regard. Basically, the researchers found that, in most cases, the person replacing the people leaving also have a lot of experience working in elections. Here’s Rachel Orey again.
OREY: These folks have experience – maybe not as a chief election official, but potentially as a deputy or working in the office – so they know what it’s like to run an election, and we’re confident in their preparedness going into November.
PARKS: The researchers found that, on average, new voting officials replacing people who have left have about eight years of experience working in the field. And in larger jurisdictions, it’s more like 11 years. So they might be more better positioned than we previously thought to handle what is sure to be a very highly scrutinized election this fall.
SHAPIRO: Well, that’s a reassuring note to end on. NPR’s Miles Parks – thanks.
PARKS: Thanks, Ari.
