SE4E1: The State of Election Administration: takeaways from the LEO survey with Paul Gronke and Paul Manson

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.

Brianna and Eric sat down with Paul Gronke and Paul Manson of the Elections & Voting Information Center about results of this last year’s Local Election Official Survey Project, looking at challenges, attitudes, and job satisfaction.

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:

Paul Gronke: Been doing focus and in depth interviews along with the survey to try to dig into some of these questions, we have found that departures are to other local offices that just pay better. Sheriff’s offices seem to be fairly common as a place where people will move to. So, you know, recruitment is a challenge, but also just the purchase of good staff. And you know, we’re all old enough here, I think to think, wow, you’re going to go to the sheriff’s office, because that’s less pressure than the elections office. Now that’s a new world for us.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Brianna Lennon: Welcome to another exciting episode of high turnout, wide margins. My name is Brianna Lennon, and I’m the county clerk in Boone County, Missouri. And with me is my co host –

Eric Fey: Eric Fey, Director of elections in St Louis County, Missouri.

Brianna Lennon: And today we’re going to be talking about local elections surveys, local election official surveys. With… you guys, could introduce yourself.

Paul Gronke: Paul Gronke, director of the elections and voting information center and a professor at Reed College.

Paul Manson: and Paul Manson, Research Director with the elections and voting information center and professor at Portland State University.

Brianna Lennon: And I probably also should have said that we are at the SPSA conference, the Southern Political Science Association Conference in Puerto Rico, so we are recording on sites from the conference, and we were invited here to talk about our own experiences and record some podcast episodes.

Paul Gronke: I want to say we’re real excited to have you all here. We’re trying to bring in more practitioners and others into this event. We all know how important it is, I think, to connect researchers and practitioners and glad to see you here. Yeah, so

Eric Fey: Yeah, so we want to start off with the question we always start off with, and I don’t know which Paul wants to go first, but tell us your origin story in elections. How did you get into this?

Paul Gronke: I came up in political science under a fairly conventional route where studying elections was we would look at a survey that was conducted every federal election year and kind of run some regressions and present some results, and then 2000 happened. And political scientists, computer scientists, many researchers, recognize that you too exist, that elections in the United States are really run by 18,000 local election administrators. So for me, I had relocated at that point to Portland, Oregon to Reed College so to cut my teeth on doing voting by mail and then early voting, and that has slowly developed into becoming one of a small number of experts on kind of surveying, running comprehensive national surveys of election administrators going to your meetings and really trying to support your work.

Paul Manson: For me, coming into researching elections, it really came from the public administration side of my work. So my research is always really focused on county offices, municipal officers. And my happy place as a researcher, I joke it’s sometimes a basement of a county office, right? This is sort of where a lot of the good work is done, serving citizens in democracy. But it wasn’t election-focused. I was sort of more general, you know, local government provisioning, sort of how folks fund and operate their offices. And then Paul and I met when we were talking over coffee about this challenge he was having. He was trying to survey local election officials in the US in 2018 trying to figure out how best to reach them. And I’m a survey researcher, methodologist, and so I said, Well, I’ve done this in other settings, trying to get a hold of county officials or county leadership. Let’s partner up and try something new. And so from 2018 on, Paul and I’ve been partnering on the design administration the survey. And over that time, I got roped into elections in a good way, so much more sort of focused narrowly on elections versus the broader local government, but the public administration piece is really what brought me to this.

Brianna Lennon: One of the topics that we want to talk about today is the actual survey. I think for context, there’s been a lot of conversations about, you know, oh, every year it seems like more people are leaving the field. Every year it seems like things are getting more stressful. But there’s always a little caveat that says, but we haven’t looked at it before, so maybe, maybe it’s always been like this, but now I feel like we have some actual data because of the survey that shows some time so we can see trends. So just, I guess, really briefly, the top line kind of impressions that you all have seen in the six years that you’ve been doing this, what’s stood out the most to both of you.

Paul Manson: You know, the piece that really stands out for me is the job satisfaction component, and that’s in part because, again, that was what I brought into the survey out of curiosity. A lot of the initial questions were about the administration steps that were taken, or the technical requirements. And I’m really interested in the people side of things. And so we started asking questions around job satisfaction and how folks felt about the work. Building on other research had been done on municipal clerks. And so, you know, the first year we ran it, we saw we were happy. We saw, you know, high job satisfaction, largely some some weaknesses. I think one challenge, when you ask folks how they’re doing, most of us have this tendency to not say bad things. We say, “Oh, we’re doing okay, don’t worry.” So we try to ask some sort of more pointed questions to get beneath that and sort of explore it. One of my favorites is asking about whether you’d recommend your child to go into the work. And so in this case, we adapted it for going into election work. And that’s where we started to see some… some lower numbers. And that number is what’s really dropped over time. So when we asked in 2020 I think we have what 40% were sharing that they’d encourage their child to go into election administration, and this year is 20% and so it’s a proxy to get at maybe a hard truth that you can’t say out loud if you just ask how you’re doing in general, but that that’s the worry is that the shifting environment is not as welcoming. And it’s not going to help retain talent. It’s not going to help retain that institutional knowledge. If folks are sharing that, they don’t think this is a viable path for the most important person in their life, their kids.

Eric Fey: I’m curious. Paul Manson, you’ve also studied other public officials. You said, what if any throughlines are there that make election officials like other local government officials, and what things, if any, are there that make us different than other folks?

Paul Manson: What’s great is there’s a real direct connection. I think all local government officials and public servants really are part of that “small d” democracy. They’re serving communities. They’re building sort of the resources and capacity for communities to be successful, but elections, it’s just, it’s so direct, right? That sort of how we organize ourselves and lead ourselves. The difference is, I think I see the most is that it’s the infrastructure problem. Elections are so taken for granted, or were so taken for granted after this process that the attention wasn’t there to say we need to continue to invest or update or pay attention to what’s going on. And sort of, and the episodic nature of elections, it’s infrastructure. It sort of goes away for periods of time and doesn’t maybe rise to the attention of elected officials who are running budgets or deciding on how to staff offices. And that’s a real challenge where a sheriff or a public works or parks or library director can say, last week, I couldn’t meet certain obligations, and here’s how we need to increase funding. You sort of have to wait and see what the next election cycle looks like and then make the case. And I think I hear that a lot talking with election officials that it’s harder to be proactive, because you sort of don’t know what you need until you get close to that event where you need all those resources so badly, where a librarian or parks director can sort of model over time or watch how that adjusts.

Paul Gronke: Yeah, one thing I’ll chime in there. So we’ve got some data. We’ve reported over the years on the increase in the maximum workload in peak Election Periods and non-peak. And the big jump number there is in the smallest jurisdictions, where, in 2023 the estimate was a 300% increase 2024 I think it’s 500% something like that. The challenge is presenting that to a state legislature and said, “Wow, four hours a week in non-Election Periods, what are they doing with the rest of their time?” It’s like, Wait, these are either part-time officials or they’re people who do something else. Brianna, I think you have other responsibilities other than running elections, and so that’s one challenge that I think is different,

Brianna Lennon: Along with seeing a drop in election officials not wanting their own families to go into elections, I know that there’s also some signs that it’s also been very hard to bring on any new people into elections, and we’ve seen that sort of in our own associations and with the turnover that we have, even of like county clerks not even getting into lower level staff or things like that… I’m wondering if you could both talk about what I guess the hiring landscape looks like right now, how people are feeling about entering into the field.

Paul Gronke: We have tried to navigate with the survey, asking questions over time that now over six years allow us to really evaluate, monitor change. You know, look at impacts of the EAC, CISA, other organizations, on how that has affected the field. At the same time, issues emerge. And it was very clear after 2020 2019 we suddenly had put our finger on a problem that I think we think your community knew about, but the broader research and policy making community didn’t. We’ve been broadly calling it office resilience, but part of it is staffing. So we’ve started to ask staffing questions. It’s hard to ask about staff. We have to ask a question that could work for both of you and also the clerk recorder supervisor of Los Angeles County, who has over 1000 staff. So we have a lot of people that want to know about hiring diversity in the staff, these kind of things, but it’s really hard to navigate that with the broad diversity we have been asking about hiring staff in this most recent one. And what’s the number, three or four percent say it’s easier. Virtually everyone’s saying it’s gotten a lot harder to hire staff over the last couple years.

Paul Manson: I think part your question was sort of also the clerks or LEOs themselves and that pathway, and we, we’ve been trying to understand that pipeline, what, what brings folks to the field? And one of the clear sort of succession pathways really does seem to be starting out in the election work and becoming a deputy, or somehow being adjacent to the office and making that move over. I think that’s where the job satisfaction and the hiring intersect here. So folks are feeling sort of less comfortable about that position, and you see your local election official get ready to resign or move on. Do you really want to put your hat in the ring? And I’ve heard in conversations with folks who’ve gone that route, the first motivator is they love the work, and they want to make sure they know who the boss is, and that means, be the boss themselves. But as the pressures have been rising, that calculus you do really want to sort of become the lightning rod. And so I think they watch this sort of threats or harassment or intimidation environment. That’s, that’s the pipeline worry there, and that’s, I think that’s both for the elected and appointed side of the world. Those they do have a little bit of a different experience, whether they come through an elected pathway or are appointed.

Paul Gronke: last quick comment, we’ve been doing focus and in-depth interviews along with the survey to try to dig into some of these questions, we have found that departures are to other local offices that just pay better sheriff’s offices seem to be fairly common as a place where people will move to. So you know, recruitment is a challenge, but also just departures of good staff. And you know, we’re all old enough here, I think, to think, wow, you’re going to go to the sheriff’s office, because that’s less pressure than the elections office. Now, that’s a new world for us.

Eric Fey: I think, yeah, just anecdotally, in Missouri, we’ve seen a number of county clerks that have left to become county treasurer or county recorder or county commissioner, because it’s less scrutiny, it’s less pressure. Same pay.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Brianna Lennon: Hi. I’m Brianna Lennon, county clerk for Boone County, Missouri, and you are listening to high turnout, wide margins, a Podcast where we explore local election administration.

Eric Fey: The thing I want to get to is size of jurisdiction. I know that well, I know I would say, in my opinion, that’s a crucial component to understanding election officials and election offices and their needs, because there are what I mean, you guys know better than me, like 50 ish, very large jurisdictions, and maybe a couple 100 medium large jurisdictions, and then 1000s of really small, predominantly rural jurisdictions and the I think the challenges are different, at least from my experience, that the large ones are relatively well resourced, they have staff. They’re mostly just focused on elections, where the small ones have a plethora of duties, it’s often very, you know, couple people in the office. So from your survey, have you found any… are there any highlights about that, about that difference, that you can share with the listeners? And then any thoughts you might have on, you know, prescriptions for how to assist those offices. You know, what kind of resources does a do the small folks need versus the larger folks?

Paul Manson: You know, the dynamic that really gets my attention is less the big versus small, but it’s the middle sized jurisdictions where I feel like the most of the pain is. So as we’re just talking about large jurisdictions, I’ll have the resources, dedicated staff. They can write their own software. In some cases, the small jurisdictions can administer an election by themselves. It can be done by hand, even because you may have 4000 voters you’re working with. I’m not sure where the cut point is, but somewhere like 15,000 25,000 then up to 100,000 voter threshold, you start to bump into some of the that next leap into other whether it’s equipment you can’t quite you know, a sorter doesn’t quite make sense, or the technology doesn’t quite make sense, or now you’re hiring a couple of staff, but you don’t have managers, you’re not big enough to have a supervisor, and so it’s that growing pain right there, and that’s tied in part to the other duties that Office has to do. So if they are doing recording work as well, maybe they can lean on that. But that seems to be the real hard part where a different experience happens. So sometimes I think we even see responses where the smalls and the bigs are in agreement, and then those middles are saying, Wait, we’ve got lots of challenges. This year, we added a question asking about sort of a sustainable investment. What would be the priority for using that investment money in facilities? Was the big one for that sort of middle group, when they were sharing, they need just to store things, just to have sort of the chain of custody all within four walls. So there’s, that’s a challenge, I think, in the middle space where the technology is not keeping up, the space isn’t keeping up, they’ve grown to a place where it doesn’t quite fit the model they have.

Brianna Lennon: That’s super reassuring to hear, because that’s how I feel all the time.

Paul Gronke: [laughs] You’re the middle I know I’m looking over at you

Brianna Lennon: That seems to be a pretty universal thing, because it does often feel like you know you don’t want to waste your resources doing something too cutting edge and too high tech, because does it really you don’t have to. You can make it work without doing that, but at the same time, you know to get to a better kind of customer service level, or a better like general future administration, you should probably invest in those things, but it’s really hard to justify. So I think that’s really interesting, and probably something that would explain some of the things that we hear from our own colleagues in our state when we’re talking about different election reforms that are coming through the legislature. That’s the initial response from a lot of our folks is, I feel like I’m right at the edge of maxing out anyway. How are we possibly going to change anything that we’re doing? And most of our counties are in that 15 to 100,000 range. Kind of jumping off of that…I know that we did the episode on the survey before, but could you give kind of an overview of the responses that you get from the surveys? What does the, I guess, the demographics of the counties that you hear back from? Because obviously not everybody’s replying to the survey. So is anybody oversampled? Is it pretty… across the board?

Paul Manson: We’ll probably take turns on this. We start out pulling 3300 offices in the US, and we do oversample. So one of the areas, we want to make sure we capture our majority minority representation. So in communities where it’s there’s more minority population, we want to see if we can capture some different experiences from the LEOs there. We know in the past, we’ve seen that diversity among local elected officials does track with the constituency, and so if it’s a more diverse jurisdiction, they’ll more likely that said, what’s been stable over time is that the composition is predominantly women and white and sort of in the 50 to 60 age range, but a lot of that is driven by the smaller jurisdictions. Nationally, response rates have been increasing for us, definitely, we’re lucky. I think the relationships over time between our research and the practitioner community has helped with that. This year, we had response rates over 60% in some states, including our home state. So folks know us there, we do sometimes have a harder time hearing from other parts of the US, so the southeast sometimes lags a little bit. Part of that has to do with sort of how we do the timing and how we get the survey out. But we do get pretty good coverage across the whole US, and usually end up around about 28% response rate on this area, which for those who do survey work, is a great number, especially compared to our colleagues in the public opinion world.

Paul Gronke: Yeah, on the technical statistical side, we have a survey weight in there. So the data that you see any averages. Again, we try back to Eric’s question before we try to always report tables broken down by jurisdiction size as well as overall means, because the overall means can be just grossly misleading at times. But those are weighted data, so they’re meant to be representative at the same time. Brianna, what that means is that 50 to 60% of those responses are coming from small jurisdictions, primarily in Michigan, Wisconsin, New England, Texas, that that’s just the reality of your world. We realized that there really had not been good, comprehensive surveys of LEOs for more than a decade, and we were really struck by the stability of the field, primarily women, you know, middle aged, white women making around 50k a year, that was kind of the standard. And there’s a lot of change in this space over 20 years, and for that to be stable was just a puzzle. I think Paul is really taking the lead on trying to understand some of the gendered nature, which we don’t have a good answer for I got to tell you. Whether historical… something connected to the word clerk, it’s the localized nature, you know, we have found on the recruitment side Brianna, that we’re finding some of the staff coming in in our own state are women, married. Married to husbands who work in natural resource industry, and they’re coming into elections work in their mid 50s to get good health care because they’re kind of worried for the future in terms of their family. But. You wouldn’t know that unless you’re talking at the local level. But again, these recruitment patterns are we’re just trying to learn more, so much to learn.

Brianna Lennon: I think that that tracks, I mean, just from the from the salary perspective, I don’t think that I’ve ever had anybody apply that would have been the breadwinner in their family, male or female, it’s It’s always somebody choosing to come into the field because they care a lot about public service, and maybe they are on their second or third career, and so they don’t need to bring in as much money as they had been earlier in their career. But it does make me worry for trying to attract new talent and people that are starting families and things that, if you talk to, I think anybody that has been working in the field for, like, 30 years, that’s why they went into the field originally, was… it was a nice, stable position. They could raise their family, and you can’t do that anymore. And I think that that is, that’s what I have seen, that’s what I’ve heard from people.

Paul Gronke: Could we, could we interview you for a moment, just one very brief question as a follow up, how do you put that into a job, advertisement or recruitment? We are really puzzling over that. What is a well, how do you put that kind of information about the benefits, about the nature of the because that’s what we again, have found in our personal interviews in Oregon, that the job ads are just out of sync. They don’t really reflect what the job is really about and how you add in that, like, exciting, fast moving, you know, I don’t know if you have an example of how you how it works well.

Eric Fey: Well, from my experience, I would say what you just said tracks with us that the job announcement or advertisement doesn’t properly convey really what’s involved. But once the people that do apply, once we get them in for an interview and kind of get a feel for where they are in life, then we kind of tailor what we say in the interview to that. So I’ve seen that younger folks are more concerned about salary and say, we have a pension, we have health care. Like they don’t care they they’re worried about the hourly rate, which is relatively low compared to, you know, like at our entry level positions, we’re competing against Amazon and McDonald’s, you know, places like that, but for people that are toward the end of their career, that have already had some other career at what, as Brianna just said earlier, they want healthcare and maybe a pension because they didn’t have one in their prior service. So we emphasize different things depending on where we think they are and the type of position. You know, entry level positions are different than maybe a middle, middle management position in our case. And you know what, what we try to convey to those folks as expectations.

Brianna Lennon: and I think we get limited by the practicalities of county government. So my job titles that I have are set by a committee of a bunch of other elected officials that we all have to meet. And if I want to change job title, I have to go pitch to them why it should be a different job title. So everybody’s a deputy clerk. And even though some aspects of the job are the same there are some specializations that each of the deputy clerks do, but I can’t really get into that until we start the interview process. So a lot of it is just hoping that people have an understanding. I will say what we run into a lot, especially because it says deputy clerk, is we get a ton of people that think we’re the court. And so they apply and they have a history of being a police officer or they worked in a law firm. And every time I see those, I know that they don’t know that this is an elections position, but there’s probably, you know, if I post a job and I get 18 applications, nine of them are going to be people that think that it’s with the circuit clerk.

Eric Fey: something that I am always curious about with political science as it relates to election administration. You know, those of us in election administration, I think we like to think of ourselves as very practical, like we just got to get this thing done in front of us or whatever. And you guys have the ability to actually study, you know what we do and some of the dynamics around us. But we don’t know… what is the goal of what you’re doing? I mean, do you do you hope to influence policy making, or how election administrators do their jobs, or maybe it’s something else, and whatever that is. Do you think you’re on your way to achieving that?

Paul Manson: Well, I want to answer first only because coming from the public administration side of the house, some of my colleagues in political science are probably trying to solve classic little science puzzles and learn new things, which is great, but my commitment really is how to support public servants, and so that’s the piece that brought me into studying elections. So my hope is that what we’re doing produces information that’s helpful, both for understanding the field, but then for practitioners to utilize. So for example, I know some of our work was that we had colleagues in Oregon who will use that to convince county commissioners that, look, here’s the basis for why we need to change how we fund or staff this office. Because we can compare ourselves to other offices or identify emerging trends and then have policy responses that are proactive versus reactive. If I had a magic wand. That’s the role I’d love to see the survey support, sort of being more proactive versus responding to stuff that pops up every year.

Paul Gronke: Yeah, that’s a big question. And I’ve been in I’m one of the, I guess, founder. I mean, I am. I’m one of the founders of this subfield. In 2000 after that, very smart people wanted to try to figure out what happened. And, you know, identified the ballot, the butterfly ballot issue and those kinds of serious problems. Unfortunately, after that wave of work, a lot of those people moved on. So what are we trying to achieve? I hope most of these people are interested in improving democracy, Eric, and improving the way elections are administered. There are folks that want to improve turnout. They want a more equitable election system. They want more access, and they’re here because they understand how important election administrators are in that process, and they want to understand, I will say, and I’ve written, so it’s not again giving anything away on the record that a lot of political scientists still come into this work with two questions in mind. One is turnout, turnout, turnout, and the second one is, you all are partisan. There’s partisanship either obvious or hidden. And I do think we’re sort of winning that battle to say, hey, there are other really important and interesting questions here, and it’s not always about turnout and it’s not always about partisanship, but I hope we’re here to really just, yeah, improve democracy. I sort of like, feel like I need to get the viability. That’s what you guys do. You’re running democracy, and you know, cue the violins.

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.