S3E26: Turning the tables: Brianna and Eric reflect on the November 2024 general election

In January, the HTWM team was invited to record a live episode at the Southern Political Science Association meeting held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In a fun turn of events, our “guests” put Brianna and Eric on the receiving end of questions  – giving them the opportunity to reflect on the administration of the November 2024 general election.

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Brianna Lennon: It was boring. November 2024, for us, was so boring. Like it was quiet – it was great from that perspective, but it was very, very quiet as a result of so many people voting beforehand. I love boring elections. 

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Paul Gronke: Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins live at the Southern Political Science Association meeting.

Applause

My name is Paul Gronke. I’m the director of Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College – 

Eric Fey: and I’m Eric Fey. I’m co-host of the High Turnout Wide Margins podcast and director of elections in St Louis County, Missouri.

Jackie Wu: Hi everyone. My name is Jackie Wu. I’m the founder and president of J Wu consulting. I’m a former election official from Orange County, California – 

Brianna Lennon: and I’m Brianna Lennon. I’m the county clerk for Boone County, Missouri, and the other co-host of the podcast.

Jackie Wu: All right, so, I’d love to invite both Brianna and Eric to reflect on the 2024 election and how it compares to recent elections. Brianna, maybe I can ask you the first question – can you share some specific experiences or stories that highlight the complexities of managing elections at the local level?

Brianna Lennon: Yeah, so, I think as we were preparing for 2024, which started, you know, in the end of 2022 really – once we were done with the midterm elections, it was just straight into thinking about 2024. Some of the changes for us – and this will probably be some of what impacted Eric, as well – is we had some legislative changes like no excuse absentee voting that we had not really had previously. We had it in the midterm elections, but we didn’t see anybody kind of leveraging it. The campaigns weren’t talking about it. Voters weren’t really using it. So, it was still pretty new to people, and I think it shocked kind of everybody that was running elections at the local level in Missouri that so many people wanted to take advantage of it. We all kind of knew – I mean, as election officials, we had been advocating for it for years. We wanted no excuse absentee voting in person. We still don’t have no excuse absentee by mail, but we did have, [we] successfully got two weeks of in-person, which operated very similar to early voting, but is still kind of narrow. And so, I think part of the challenge was explaining to people. They would hear “early voting,” and we would say, “well, it’s not really early voting because we can’t call it early voting. It’s no excuse absentee.” And they would say, “Well, isn’t it absentee if it’s by mail?” and we’d say, “Well, no, it’s both.” So, it made it very hard to message for it.

So, it was very helpful that campaigns and just general advocacy groups started pushing for voters to vote before Election Day, and we saw those numbers skyrocket. We had close to 30% of our overall turnout came from no excuse absentee voting, and the biggest challenge that we had was really logistics.

So, leading up to the ‘24 election, we were trying to make sure that we had all of our law enforcement partnerships up, we were doing all these tabletop exercises, we were making sure we had physical security, but we were still very limited in Boone County, especially by the physical spaces that we had to be able to do no excuse absentee voting. So thankfully, we had a really good process in place because we had learned about, like, the actual getting voters through the line in 2022, but then we had to get 1000s of people through those lines, and our office is only so big. So, we used the rest of the government center, but our entire building was completely full of voters for at least a week and it shut down other offices – like other offices were mad at us because people would come in to pay their taxes, and there was no place for them to physically stand while they were waiting for the Collector’s office. So, I know that some counties had rented out spaces in advance of things. We just, we have a real challenge with finding large places – also with parking. So, we opened some weekend locations and things like that, but I would say, like the biggest thing that we now need to figure out how to work successfully in the future is how to deal with the popularity of no excuse absentee voting.

Paul Gronke: Yeah, just one quick follow up, Brianna, you brought to mind. So, I was on a post-election evaluation of Kansas way back 2012 maybe. They were considering early voting and the challenge for a lot of counties was the physical infrastructure available. It just said, we can’t sign a lease on a piece of property for a month long with ADA, parking and internet access, right? So, I suspect you have some of the same challenges [with] infrastructure?

Brianna Lennon:  Yeah, oh, yeah. No, absolutely, and to be honest, I don’t know where people parked. They had to have been parking illegally downtown because there was no way, I mean, we were averaging like – 

Paul Gronke: You didn’t give little parking –

Brianna Lennon: No, we were averaging, like – there’s only street parking, so they had to do street parking – and we were averaging 1500 people a day coming through the building. So, I really don’t know where they were parking.

Eric Fey: La la la la la

Laughter

Brianna Lennon: Yeah, I don’t need to know where they were parking, but I mean, what I think is really great though – is I think sometimes local election officials get a reputation for saying no to things all the time, especially for legislation when legislators say, like, “Well, I’m going to do this proposal,” and we go, “Oh, it’s going to be it’s going to cost this much, it’s going to be this hard for us to do, we don’t want to do it.” Pretty universally, the local election officials in Missouri – even having this like, upsurge of people voting early and everybody having something to contend with have said, “Great, let’s expand it. Let’s do it more. Let’s make the period longer.”

So, I think that’s a really great sign of how far we’ve kind of come from thinking about things, as like –  “This was really difficult. It made our jobs hard.” Everybody is now really leaning into it, and I think also saw the benefit of having so many people voting before Election Day, how easy it made Election day itself. It was boring. November 2024, for us, was so boring, like it was quiet – it was great from that perspective, but it was very, very quiet as a result of so many people voting beforehand.

Laughter

Brianna Lennon: I love boring elections.

Jackie Wu: Great, and let me pose a question now, over to Eric – again, can you share some specific experiences or stories that highlighted the complexities of managing elections at the local level?

Eric Fey: Yeah, specifically to November ‘24, I think – just to add or expound upon what Brianna said a little bit – what a lot of folks fail to recognize is that to secure early voting locations, election officials have to make those agreements months in advance. In our case – so we in 2024, we had an April election, an August election, a November election. So, we’re looking for early voting sites for all those elections, and we made agreements with our Public Library District, which was a great partner to work with. The University of Missouri St Louis, which always hosts an early voting location and a couple county facilities. But like Brianna and like all Missouri election officials, we weren’t quite counting on the volume of voters even though we doubled the amount of locations we had in November of 2024. But the libraries – the parking lots were not huge, and so they filled up very quickly, and then people were illegally parking and blocking traffic and everything else. And people were angry at us, you know, “Why don’t you have bigger facilities with more parking?” And disability advocates were upset with us because folks that needed to be able to vote from their car – it was very difficult because there was no but nowhere to park your car in many cases. But, on the other hand, if we would have even planned for that further out – there’s still difficulties. Like, we contacted one of the large malls in our county that is like half vacant – as many malls are nowadays – and knowing that, you know, months from now they would probably have a large vacant space and they have a lot of parking, and they said, “Yeah, we’d be open to that,” you know, “it’d be like several $1,000 a day rent” and we’d have to indemnify them against, you know, certain losses or whatever, and in Missouri, the state constitution prohibits governments from indemnifying private parties. So, our attorney said, “No, you can’t, can’t do it,” and they said, “Well, then you can’t vote people here.” So, you know, it’s just the public library district allowed us to use the libraries for free, and, you know, didn’t make us indemnify them for anything. So, it was a great deal, but also during that time nobody could check out a library book or whatever. So yeah, it was tough.

And then the other thing I touched on earlier, the length of ballot was really a challenge. We were pushed to a 20 inch ballot, and I know places like – cool places like Orange County have multi-card ballots all the time with like, you know, four page ballots, but we have never had a multi-card ballot in St Louis County, and so, I was really trying hard to avoid that because that really decreases your throughput at at all the early voting sites. And then people, you know, don’t cast the first or second card, or they forget, and, you know, it’s, it’s a kind of a reconciliation nightmare, and so, we were, there was one city that put two or three propositions on the ballot, and they were going to push us to a second card – that one city. So, it was like just a handful of precincts, and so, we pleaded with them to shorten the ballot wording on one of their propositions so it would all fit on one ballot. And then one of the judges dropped out, so that was great.

Laughter 

Eric Fey: But so, you know, then again, all the academics here, maybe that’s a field of study is, you know, ballot length and the ramifications of that.

And then, also in Missouri, we don’t have a voters guide, you know, California, Oregon, places like that, have, you know, extensive voters’ guides. I don’t know to what extent people actually utilize them, but, you know, we do send a sample ballot to every voter. So does Brianna, but we’re the outliers in Missouri. Most counties don’t send any sample ballot, nothing to voters, and they get there and it’s a pop quiz at the polling place. So, it doesn’t lead to expedient voting. So, I’ll stop there. I’m droning on 

Paul Gronke: I want to say I have Jackie Wu’s book here. “ On the Front Lines of Democracy: An Election Official’s Story of Protecting the Vote in 2020.” I think this is shorter than the recent California voters’ guide, you know, there have been two volume California guides.

Again, just one, quick research follow up. I made eye contact with my colleague, Paul Manson. So, in Portland, some folks may know we implemented a new voting system, and Paul Manson and I were communicating with the local official there, Tim Scott, trying to figure out how to fit the number of candidates who were going to be on the municipal, on the city council election, and Tim was like – he went to, he, first it was 14 inch, then it was 17 inch, then it was like, I think, 19 inch was the max, and folks that aren’t really into the weeds here may not realize, you cannot get a vendor that supplies the card stock necessary. You got to do that. So, the election occurs, and in a particular district – District One in Portland – the drop off rate in the local election was higher than the other districts. This was also the most diverse district, highest minority population, and there was, very quickly, a lot of hand wringing, and “This is a big problem,” and then, it turns out that every time we’ve had a two card ballot, there’s been significantly higher drop off on that second ballot in that area. Now it’s a problem with that area, but it’s two cards that caused us the problem, not so much necessarily this new election system. 

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Paul Gronke: So, we’re going to pivot over to Q&A. Brianna, you’re going to be giving up your mic, so you have to share with Jackie. If you have a question, could you please raise your hand and let Kevin get to you with the microphone.

Joseph Anthony: I’m Joseph Anthony at the State University of New York in Courtland though I’m a native Missourian, so I’m very hometown proud right now. So, my question actually is related to Paul’s remark about training. So, I know many election officials, maybe even most election officials, go through professional development, ongoing training in your profession. I wonder if you all have had to develop or implement new trainings around disinformation and misinformation – either for yourselves or for your staff in your offices?

Paul Gronke: Hey Joseph, I just want to chime in one thing. I think it would be the case that it’s – there’s a lot of variation in whether officials go through training. What we’ve learned on the survey is that in the smaller jurisdictions, a lot of it is quite informal and kind of learning from the person who’s there before. So, I think there’s less consistency in the training. That’s just I believe that that’s right.

Brianna Lennon: I think we’re seeing, well, I will say, for Missouri, our association, our state association, is working on more formalized training because we’ve seen the need for it, especially with so many new people. I think the attitude has really shifted from seasoned election officials that would previously say, “I’ve got this. I don’t really want anybody else telling me how to do my job because I know my community,” to people coming in with very little background or context saying, “Tell me exactly what I’m supposed to do because I have no idea what I’m doing.” So, associations, at least in Missouri, are trying to step in and fill that role, so that we don’t have people that feel like they’re not prepared or that they’re not supported – so that they stick around. For misinformation, in particular, I think a lot of, I mean, just kind of the, I guess it’d be NGOs and things like that – like the nonprofit space, the consultant space of elections – has really blossomed over the last four years, and there’s been a lot more of that independent training available on dealing with misinformation, on working on best practices, and so, while we are mandated under our statute to do 20 hours of training, and yes, sometimes that includes some stuff on misinformation in social media. Oftentimes, it’s easier to have my staff sign up for a webinar and sit through the webinar that’s provided by the Elections Group or something like that.

Stephanie Puello: Stephanie Puello, again, from the University of Miami. So, my question is a little broader. I’m just interested – and you kind of alluded to this, particularly when you were talking about, you know, voters sending emails and stuff like that – but I’m just curious of your general experience dealing with, like, this, just heightened scrutiny that local election officials are dealing with. So, I’m from Florida, where you have, like, the election crimes and security unit, and I’m just curious, are you really experiencing that scrutiny? Mostly from voters? Or, you know, is there anything kind of happening within the state that has kind of just affected your day to day? Be it for yourselves or other colleagues in other counties?

Jackie Wu: Thanks for the question. I think it depends on the locality, and what factors are affecting that locality. So, I’ll say, for the Los Angeles and Orange County region in California, we saw a massive increase in threats of violence for election officials. So, in 2020 it was unprecedented in terms of – in LA County, we had a ballot drop box set on fire – 

Paul Gronke: We’re not the only ones, hmm?

Jackie Wu: No, and unfortunately, it has spread, and LA County is on fire right now. So, those are now things that election officials have to think about. We’re not just worried about bad actors that are trying to affect election outcomes from outside of the country, but those that are here. And that is a really big concern because it’s an additional layer that election officials have to take, to have to address. But that’s not something that you include in a job description – is how do you deal with a bomb threat? How do you deal with an active shooter threat? But yet, these are things that we’re all thinking about.

I’ll also add in LA County, they – I recently took a tour of their new ballot processing center, which is amazing. It’s, I think, they took an old Fry’s electronic store and turned it into a ballot processing site, but I also – on that tour, I learned that when they received their vote by mail ballots back before their process, they go through a sniff test by a bomb dog, and that’s really scary, and they also test for fentanyl – if it comes placed with fentanyl that would be an issue for election officials that are processing it, and these are all things that we think about,

Eric Fey: Yep, and so, there are a lot of officials in the rest of the country that are like, “Yeah, it would be nice to have a bomb sniffing dog and, like, test for fentanyl, but it’s three of us here running these elections. So, how do we do that?”

Paul Gronke: Yeah, and the learning in Oregon about securing drop boxes, and that’s a – it’s complicated because we have drop boxes in locations that are not easily secured. And I, you know, we wrote a little bit about this after 2024, you know, when it says “the mini mart when highway one hits highway two, “ there’s a reason for that, because it’s right on the edge of a Native American reservation, and it’s the most convenient location. So, if rules and regulations are put in place to try to make – like Eric said, “Be careful what you wish for” – you want live internet video feeds and, well, half the locations are not going to be viable anymore. So, it’s going to be difficult to juggle that one. Hopefully there was not much learning, and people didn’t figure out how to create incendiary devices that penetrate half inch rolled steel, but anyway – 

And I think we have time for one more – 

Mara Suttmann-Lea: Thank you. This was, yeah, a really good experience for someone who’s feeling a little down post 2024, and so, my question relates to the future. It’s a two part question. One, what are some of the challenges that, you know, obviously Brianna and Eric, you’re still both in elections – but what are you sort of pivoting to in terms of challenges? But also, was there anything about 2024 that left you feeling hopeful?

And then related, and selfishly, what would you like us political scientists in the room to turn our attention to? Because I have been, myself, doing a re-examination of my own research process.

Oh, and I should say, I’m Mara Suttmann-Lea from Connecticut College. Apologies, I’m not a podcaster.

Paul Gronke: And Andrew Carnegie fellow.

Mara Suttmann-Lea: Oh yes.

Paul Gronke: Along with Lisa A. Bryant at California State,  Fresno.

Mara Suttmann-Lea: Andrew, Andrew Carnegie fellow, yes.

Eric Fey: I don’t, I think staffing is going to continue – that’s just going to be a perennial issue. I think, regardless of the size of jurisdiction, attracting and retaining employees is a challenge, and the perennial issue of funding is always a challenge. I think, a couple things that immediately jump to mind from your question that I think are kind of arising out of ‘24 are one – signature verification with vote by mail ballots, like, that’s now suddenly gaining more consciousness, I think, about the quality of signatures. We’ve seen it – you all probably see it – people who are in college, like traditional college age students, like, don’t know how to sign stuff quite often, and don’t have, you know, handwriting skills. So, how do we verify signatures? You know, is there, I mean, my kind of long term, you know, sci-fi wish list is like, maybe there’s, like another biometric, you know, kind of verification with vote by mail ballots that, you know, I don’t know, in the US context, that’s probably hard.

So, that’s one thing, and then kind of – somebody touched on it earlier – the viability of the Postal Service. There was a lot of angst, even in our community where not a lot of people vote by mail, about the Postal Service, and we rely on the Postal Service for so much more than just transmitting ballots, and that’s required by statute. So, that’s a concern, and then –  I just had something, and I lost it, but – Oh, on a hopeful note, if you spend enough time in a voting location – early voting or Election Day polling place or whatever, and you interact with voters and poll workers, I almost guarantee that will leave you more hopeful because regardless of political stripe, you see poll workers from opposite parties working together against all odds, trying to get things done. And the voters, by and large, were super appreciative of the poll workers and the election officials this time, and were just very happy to have the opportunity to cast their ballot, as long as there was enough parking. So, I think that, you know, we fret a lot about a lot of things, and maybe it’s just because the general public has such a low expectation of governmental service that when something goes even somewhat right, they’re like, “Oh, thank you for what you do.” So, I’ll stop there, but those are, I think, that’s a hopeful thing,

Brianna Lennon: Yeah, well, and kind of jumping off of that – I think the thing that I constantly have to remind myself and my staff reminded me many times is, you know, I did have those handful of people that were constantly like scrutinizing everything, but never like one of the things was that – we did satellite locations for early voting, and a voter has never complained about having satellite locations, and the people that were scrutinizing everything voted at the satellite locations – 

Eric Fey: And then complained about it

Brianna Lennon: – and then complained, well, didn’t complain about it, complained that it shouldn’t exist, but since it does exist, we’ll vote there.

Eric Fey: Right.

Laughter

Brianna Lennon: So, there was a lot that, you know, people kept reminding me –  like everybody is happy and satisfied with what we’re doing, other than these handful of people that are really just trying to find a problem with it, even when there really isn’t one.

What I was going to add for something that would be really wonderful if I could just have in my back pocket is actual statistics on how worse hand counting is. Hand counting. Because right now, when everybody says, “Well, we want to do hand counting.” Sure, we can go back to the 40s and look at the things that say why did we implement voting machines in the first place. Why did we have to move to that because of accuracy and things like that. But I would really like a much more recent comparison to say, “When we do hand counting, it is x times less accurate, it is x times less secure. Here are the risk factors, and here’s why it doesn’t work” – literally, compared to the optical scanners. Not compared to punch cards or lever machines or anything else. I need something recent that I can point to because we constantly get that question, and I can explain why, administratively, it would be a nightmare. But I cannot point to a single thing that says, and here’s something that says why it would be worse because what people come back to is, “But I don’t see why it would be. There’s nothing that says that it would be and everybody that I’m talking to says that it would be even better and here’s a 500 page manual that has been written on it.”

Laughter

Paul Gronke: So, Mara I will take a stab at this and then give the final comment to Jackie. I would say I’m hopeful about two things. One, I’m hopeful that the threats and harassment and language directed at election officials will begin to decline, that the misinformation about election procedures that that tide is going to go down, I hope, and that election officials will not have to deal with that as much. So, that I’m hopeful about, and I’m also hopeful that there are substantial resources being placed in the areas of staffing and hiring. There are at least three, maybe four projects that I know of that are collecting archives of job ads, of successful hiring strategies, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to roll some of those out to other officials. We were talking about this with Eric and Brianna earlier – to finally get either the recognition that HR offices matter and that, as Eric, you said earlier,it’s not your office that does the hiring, it’s the HR office, or Brianna perhaps said, you have to negotiate on what the job is – so all you have are a bunch of deputy clerks. So, I’m hopeful that we’ll get over the hump and help state governments, county governments, HR offices realize that this is what this job involves, let’s have some compensation studies, and let’s hire better people. Because I think the information is out there, but it’s just so dispersed that even within a state, there’s, you know, again, you’ve seen these presentations where it’s a job ad listed – it’s at the Dollar General on the bulletin board because that’s the main place where stuff gets posted – whereas over here, they’re using a big – so, if we can figure out a way, as scholars, to aggregate some of that information and identify successes, I think we’ll be able to kind of improve the staff moving up that will replace these two when they finally decide to hang it up, which will be never, of course. But after, after year five.

Jackie Wu: I’m hopeful because there are spaces like this, and there’s more, we’re seeing more and more people want to take action on ensuring election administration continues moving forward with the staffing to support it. There, I’m grateful that there are academics, like those that are in the audience right now, who are asking election officials, “What can our research do to support election officials?” I mean, that is definitely a big concern. After 2020, we had a large wave of election officials resign – including myself, and there is a question, “Well, what does that mean for the future, if we have more election officials resign after this 2024 election cycle?“

Because I’ll say, in response to a question that was posed earlier, how do you get trained to become an election official? And I would say I didn’t really feel trained until after I went through my first election. You learned on the job, quite literally. But what if everyone is new? And I think that will be a problem when you, the mix is mostly new and not really having seasoned election officials there to help train the new ones.

So, that being said, I’m hopeful also, because there is something that everyone can do whether you’re a listener on this podcast, sitting in the audience in this room – in terms of identifying misinformation when it comes up, supporting election officials, getting to know them, helping them spread their messages, or perhaps, if you’ve never considered it, becoming election official yourself. And, it could be like me, where I was just there for a few election cycles or maybe it’s something that, one that you could see yourself spending your career in, but there’s definitely, there are ways to ensure that it continues to move forward.

Paul Gronke: So,I’d like to thank Eric Fey, Brianna Lennon and Jackie Wu, and let’s give them a round of applause. Thank you.

 Applause

Brianna Lennon:  You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Brianna Lennon alongside Eric Fey. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.