In Brief:
- The rate of election official turnover has increased in recent years.
- This trend has been widely reported, sparking concerns about lack of experience in the current workforce.
- A comprehensive survey of turnover among chief election officials finds that despite a steady increase over the last two decades, the norm is that officials now in these jobs bring significant experience to them.
Election officials are under scrutiny as never before, and partisans have been laying the groundwork to challenge their 2024 vote count since 2020.
A report from the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and election researchers at UCLA offers a comprehensive and nuanced look at election workforce turnover between 2004 and 2024. It finds evidence of long-term problems but falls short of revealing a crisis.
The research team looked at turnover in every state over two decades, drawing on a data set of nearly 19,000 chief election officials across more than 6,000 jurisdictions.
As measured in the report, “turnover” means a change in the person holding a chief election official job. This could be due to losing an election, a term running out, retirement, relocation, illness or any other reason, including threats or harassment.
Turnover, measured over two-year intervals, has increased slowly but steadily since 2004. The biggest increase in rate (5 percent) was between 2020 and 2022, but this doesn’t reflect a “flood” of people leaving office. “More people have left in the last few years than normally leave,” says Dan Thompson, one of the report’s authors, “but if you looked a few years ago, you could have said the same thing.”
The deepest concern about departures is that election departments will be in the hands of people who lack experience. With the stakes so high and the pressure so great, inexperience is a legitimate worry. As BPC learned, it’s not the new norm.
Change Can Be Good
On average, Thompson found, new chief election officials (i.e., the “turnover”) have eight years of experience administering elections. Those new to the job in jurisdictions over 100,000 have 11 years of previous experience. The change hasn’t been as dramatic as feared, he says. The people taking over these jobs are often prepared for them already or prepared to get up to speed quickly.
Rachel Orey, director of BPC’s Elections Project and co-author of the report, saw heads nodding in assent when presenting its findings at a recent national meeting of election officials. It’s not that turnover isn’t a serious concern — but it’s not all downside.
New officials know what they’re getting into, Orey says. A person who’d been in the same role for years when the 2020 pushback began might not have signed up to work under such intense pressure and scrutiny. “Now we have these new officials coming in clear-eyed and driven, really wanting to make a difference,” says Orey. The potential for new directors to bring renewed skills, interest and passion to election administration hasn’t resonated outside the profession in the same way that “tsunami of turnover” has.
It wouldn’t be unexpected for threats and harassment to have an outsized impact on turnover, but rates were similar in jurisdictions with more and less harassment — an observation that warrants more exploration, according to the report's authors. The impact of an aging workforce is easier to trace. More than 7 in 10 election officials were 50 years old in 2020; 6 in 10 who were 65 or older then have since left their jobs.
“There are a bunch of potential explanations,” Thompson says. “We think they’re all probably partly contributing to this increase, but that the increase is not as bad as it’s being made out to be."
Worst-Case Scenario
Arizona was cast as a worst-case scenario for turnover in 2023 by a report that 80 percent of its counties had gained a new chief election official since 2020. Scott Jarrett, director of elections for Maricopa County, Ariz., notes that reporting about his state has glossed over an important detail regarding its elections. Responsibility for election administration is shared by a county recorder and an election director. There are no counties where both officials left their jobs.
Jarrett’s colleagues have endured an extreme volume of false accusations and threats since 2020, but he’s confident that those now on the job are up to the task ahead. “The vast majority of jurisdictions have experienced people that have worked several election cycles, if not a decade of election cycles, that they are bringing to the table for this upcoming 2024 presidential election,” Jarrett says.
Jarret is the president of Election Officials of Arizona, which meets monthly to share best practices. When a county experiences turnover, it lends resources and expertise. The state election director, Lisa Marra, has gone to smaller counties to help with training. “Election officials are very resilient and resourceful folks,” Jarret says. “We’ve established these communities."
What About Next Time?
The November election may be well in hand, but Jarrett could imagine challenges down the road if turnover rates continue to rise. BPC recommends strategies including better compensation, training, mentorships, collaboration between election stakeholders and stable federal and state funding to address “both the chronic and the emerging roots” of turnover.
“I don't want to undersell the challenges election officials are facing,” Orey says. “But my experience of election administrators is that they're driven [and] they want to run a good election in 2024 and so they're sticking it out — but who knows what’s going to happen next year.”
