Turnover among election officials rose to a new high in 2024 : NPR

A member of the office of the Kenosha County Bureau office set up voting cabins on October 21, 2024, in preparation for the anticipated vote in person in Kenosha, Wisconsionnes.

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Images Scott Olson / Getty

The turnover among the country’s electoral officials continued to increase – now almost five years after Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overthrow the 2020 competition led those responsible for the vote with more pressure and harassment.

According to research on Tuesday of the Biparartisan Policy Policy Policy Policy Policy Policy Policy Policy Center. The trend has been particularly pronounced in the major jurisdictions, where the disinformation of the Trump campaign on the vote is often concentrated.

“This combines with challenges, professional exhaustion, threats and harassment facing electoral officials,” said Rachel Oury, who oversees the center’s electoral project.

Over the past two decades, turnover in the elections has gradually increased, but the new report, on which Orey has worked with UCLA researchers, Joshua Ferrer and Daniel Thompson, shows how 2020 amplified the trend.

Orey first worked with Ferrer and Thompson last year to analyze a new set of data which included more than 18,000 local electoral officials in more than 6,000 jurisdictions. Their initial report showed a rotation rate which increased from 28% in 2004 to 39% in 2022.

In 2024, the rolling rate increased to 41%, the highest it has been at least in the past 25 years.

“The increase in turnover is almost like a canary in the coal mine, indicating that something deeper and more structural in the way we carry out elections must be fixed,” said Orey, noting specifically that the elections in the United States are chronically underfunded.

A recent survey of voting civil servants conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, for example, revealed that 1 out of 5 electoral manager has refused a budget request, and 4 out of 5 civil servants are concerned with a certain extent to the recent federal funding reductions targeting electoral security programs.

In recent years, these funding challenges have been combined with an information war on the processes of electoral officials – the one who seems to continue at least until the middle of next year.

On Monday, President Trump made numerous false claims on the elections and said that his administration was writing a decree that would try to prohibit the postal vote as well as the machines that local elections used to tabule the ballots.

Legal experts claim that such actions would be unconstitutional, but even if they were ultimately interrupted by the courts, they could still reduce the credibility of the electoral system and justify future challenges.

“The danger of interference in the mid-term elections is real, and it is a dangerous step in this direction,” wrote Rick Hasen, an electoral expert at the UCLA on Monday in response to Trump’s claims.

However, even with a torrent of false information last year, the 2024 elections were largely considered to be an administrative success: survey data revealed that nearly 9 out of 10 voters estimated that it was well managed.

Orey said it should give the public confidence that even if voting managers are faced with new challenges, including unprecedented turnover, they are still able to administer fair elections.

“We have seen electoral officials going to the plate,” said Oury. “To create new recruitment pipelines and develop and improve training programs to ensure that new electoral officials have the knowledge, skills and capacities they need to do their job well.”

The researchers found that almost 60% of people replacing those who left had experience in the elections in a certain title, and almost 80% had an experience before the government.