“They are exhausted,” Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials, which includes 1,800 officials in the U.S., told WIRED. “People are tired and we haven’t even started the election cycle yet this year. They’re still getting attacked, they’re still getting death threats as of 2020.”
They are also trying to simply do their job and ensure that eligible voters can vote and the politicians on the ballot accept the results no matter what. “As a nation, we’re holding our breath to see if that happens,” Patrick said.
According to a new report released this week by the Bipartisan Policy Center, turnover among poll workers has risen dramatically since 2020, with researchers seeing a nearly 40 percent increase in resignations between 2004 and 2022.
“It’s difficult to recruit people who can handle the tremendous pressure that comes with election administration,” Stuart Holmes, Washington state elections director, told WIRED. “We often find that people either love election administration and are with it for life or leave within six months.”
In some cases, like Buckingham County, Virginia, entire election offices have folded because of threats.
“We have examples across the country where the entire office resigned because they were simply mentally unfit to go to work every day and were bombarded with death threats,” Patrick said. “It’s not the kind of situation you would imagine for the United States of America. These are the kinds of things we would think about in difficult new democracies that don’t have the traditions that many of us now know we took for granted, like concessions when you lose.”
Leslie Hoffman, who ran the election office in Arizona’s Yavapai County, where vigilantes monitored mailboxes, resigned in 2022. At the time, she cited the “viciousness” of the threats she received. She later told WIRED that she actually resigned because her dog was poisoned shortly before she left office. No one was ever arrested or charged, but she believes it was related to her campaign work.
For those election officials and staff who remained in their roles, they will now have to step in as early as 2024 to fill in for colleagues who have left and whose positions remain vacant – including at least one role as elections director.
According to the Brennan Center survey, one in five officials who will work on the 2024 vote will be doing so for the first time.
“Institutional knowledge is so important. “Staff turnover in an election administration can look like they didn’t know how to set it up, or opened their polling places too late, or directed people to the wrong location,” Christina Baal-Owens, executive director of voting rights organization Public Wise, told WIRED. “There are also training and recruitment costs. Hiring costs money and recruiting costs money. It’s a waste of resources.”
Baal-Owens also points out that the loss of experienced staff can have a less obvious impact: “Voting is incredibly local, and in many communities it is older people who vote and they have relationships with the people who managed them. ” Choose. Therefore, it is also very important to lose these relationships. The loss of that institutional knowledge is a problem.”