Jane Timm for NBC News:

Election officials across the country are leaving their jobs at the highest rates in decades, according to new research shared first with NBC News, putting thousands of new officials in place to oversee a tense and high-stakes 2024 presidential contest. 

At least 36% of local election offices have changed hands since 2020, following a similar exodus in the run-up to the midterms in 2022, when 39% of jurisdictions had new lead election officials from four years previously. Both points in time represented the highest four-year turnover rates in two decades, a development that worries election experts and officials who say such jobs are complex and come with a steep learning curve and no margin for error. And 2024’s turnover rate could continue to rise as the year goes on.

Election workers have been exposed to unprecedented scrutiny, threats and harassment following the presidential election in 2020, when Donald Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen and made baseless claims of voter fraud. And as Trump seeks the presidency for the third time, he has continued to predict voter fraud — seeming to lay the groundwork to again claim the election was stolen if he loses in November.

While the turnover rate has jumped in recent years, researchers found that it has been gradually rising for years, suggesting that both new and long-standing challenges are driving administrators from their jobs. From 2000 to 2004, about 28% of local election officials left their jobs. Four years later, 31% of election offices had changed hands.

Experts say that dynamic only reinforces the need to provide better funding and support for election workers to ensure the smooth administration of future elections.

“This gradual increase that we’ve seen over the last two decades really does highlight the need for comprehensive, coordinated strategies that seek to better fund election administration, that seek to reduce the burdens being placed on these election administrators,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Rachel Orey, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project. “Because clearly, this isn’t something that only happened back in 2020.”

The research was conducted by UCLA researchers Daniel M. Thompson and Joshua Ferrer, who spent years collecting lists and directories of election officials in counties and municipalities around the country to produce the most accurate and expansive picture of election worker turnover available yet. Their data was analyzed and published in partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, in an effort to better understand turnover as election administrators face harassment, violent threats and increasingly complex and heavy workloads….

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The Tarrant County Election Board Tuesday approved an initiative to use pre-numbered ballots in the general election in November. 

In a briefing to the county commissioners ahead of the board’s vote, Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig said that pre-numbered ballots would increase election security and allow for more accurate auditing in the case of voter fraud inquiries. 

The practice, however, is outdated, largely unused by electoral authorities elsewhere in the United States and, contrary to proponents’ claims, could actually facilitate voter fraud, rather than prevent it, according to legal, political and computer science experts. 

Ballots in Tarrant County already receive a unique identifying number at the moment of voting, and adding more identifying information to voters’ ballots could potentially make it easier for bad actors to commit fraud like vote buying and voter coercion, according to David Kimball, a political scientist and ballot design specialist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

“The best thing preventing vote buying is the secret ballot,” he said in a phone interview. 

Ballots in federal elections are available for public viewing for 22 months after the election. If a person’s vote is tied to a specific number, then someone who has bought or coerced votes could use the pre-numbered ballot list to confirm that they got their bribe or intimidation obtained the desired result. 

Kimball said that pre-numbering ballots is “extremely rare” in the United States and that most ballots cast in the country have no identifying numbers at all on them. “I don’t know that anybody does it,” he said. “You want the ballots to be anonymous.” 

Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University who has done extensive research on voting machines, pointed to the same risks associated with serial numbers on ballots. 

“The secret ballot is pretty important as a principle, since well over 100 years ago, to prevent people from being paid or coerced to vote a certain way,” he said in a phone interview. 

The best way to prevent ballot stuffing and other types of fraud mentioned by proponents of pre-numbered ballots is to staff polling places with a sufficient number of adequately trained election workers, Appel said. 

“The standard practice is to have enough confidence in your poll workers and to pay enough attention to poll worker training,” he said, adding that staffing polling places with multiple election workers is another age-old tactic for avoiding fraud. “One dishonest poll worker can’t stuff ballots, because there’s another poll worker that can keep an eye on that.”…

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Wisconsin voters on Tuesday approved two referendums that change the state Constitution to prohibit clerks from using private grants to administer elections and add that only appointed election officials can perform tasks to conduct elections.

With over 99% of the vote reported by Wednesday morning, 54.4% of voters approved the first question and 58.6% had approved the second. A majority of Wisconsin voters must vote in favor of a constitutional amendment in order for it to go into effect.

Because a majority of voters selected “yes,” clerks will no longer be able to apply for, accept or use private donations and grants, and the state Constitution will include that only election officials designated by law can perform tasks to conduct elections.

An analysis from the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys found that state law already says only appointed election officials can conduct elections, but doesn’t say what activities count as conducting an election. Liberal groups that opposed the referendum worried the lack of clarity could lead to lawsuits….

Dennis Mema has posted this draft on SSRN (53 Pub. Con. L. J. 261 (2023)). Here is the abstract:

The continuous and successful holding of elections stands as one of the foundational pillars of American democracy. In the two decades since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), federal, state, and local actors have worked in tandem to improve election administration, and, through funding provided by Congress to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), states have been given the means to implement federal best practices. However, there exists a glaring gap wherein many states have diverged from both federal best practices and the behavior of other states—the procurement of election infrastructure such as ballots, voting machines, and tabulators. The procurement processes of some states impose inefficiencies or otherwise negatively impact the administration of elections, while the processes present in others can much more effectively facilitate the resolution of these issues. These processes can have a direct impact on voting rights and the security of election administration. Congress should create a federally implemented procurement standard within HAVA that states must meet in order to receive additional EAC funding; by doing so, the interests of all American voters may be protected at the highest level.

You can find the majority opinion and the dissent at this link.

The majority holds that the provision applies only to the question of who is eligible to vote, not whether an eligible voters’ votes are counted.

The court remanded for a consideration of an equal protection challenge, but that will be a tough claim to make.

This issue can really matter in a close statewide election. As the dissenting judge noted, “More than one million Pennsylvania voters mailed in their ballots in the November 2022 election. Of them, 10,000 timely-received ballots were not counted because they did not comply with the State law requirement that the voters’ declarations (‘the declarations”) on the mailing envelopes include a date below the voter’s signature [Citation], even though the date on the envelope is not used to (1) evaluate a voter’s statutory qualifications to vote, (2) determine the ballot’s timeliness, or (3) confirm that the voter did not die before Election Day or to otherwise detect fraud.”

The Record:

U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency will not identify the latest leaders of their joint election security task force, in part to shield them from the threats and harassment other election officials have received for merely being associated with such work.

In a departure from previous election cycles, neither organization will publicize the names of the co-chiefs of the Election Security Group (ESG) because of the often-hostile environment surrounding U.S. elections since the 2020 presidential race, Recorded Future News has learned.

The identities also are being withheld, government sources said, as part of a larger push by top U.S. national security and law enforcement officials to convey that election security is a whole-of-government effort and therefore public messaging on the charged topic should be driven by agency chiefs — such as the Director of National Intelligence or the head of the FBI — and not bureaucratic entities or career employees.

The shift in strategy and the heightened concern for the safety of officials both come as the Biden administration warns of potential foreign interference in the November elections as well as dangers to individuals who help run the system.

The warnings are on top of longstanding concerns about potential cyberattacks targeting voting infrastructure, or human errors becoming amplified in influence operations that undermine confidence in election outcomes — especially with the rise of commercially available artificial intelligence tools that can assist an array of attacks at scale….

New explainer from the Bipartisan Policy Center, Issue One, and the R Street Institute.

Bolts:

For the past two years, Nick Ramos has volunteered his time to ensure more Wisconsinites can participate in elections: with a mobile printer in hand, he visits polling places in the Milwaukee area to help people who lack proper identification obtain it on the spot, so that they are eligible to vote.

But Ramos, who directs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that promotes good government, says he may not volunteer in the future if voters approve Question 2, a constitutional amendment on the state’s April 2 ballot. “This thing gets passed, and I’d be very afraid to do that again,” he told Bolts.

The measure would require that only “an election official designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections or referendums.” It can easily read as an innocuous codification of existing statute, and it has generated no campaign spending on either side of the issue since Republican lawmakers chose to place it on the ballot late last year.

Among advocates for voting rights and for well-resourced election administration, however, this under-the-radar proposal is alarming. A slew of lawyers, elections experts, and nonprofit leaders tell Bolts Question 2 is written so vaguely as to invite lawsuits over what constitutes a “task” and what, exactly, it means to help “conduct” an election. 

They fear this confusion will have a chilling effect on the many non-governmental groups and volunteers who assist in election administration. If it passes, the measure is set to go into effect this year, ahead of November’s presidential election in which Wisconsin is again considered a critical swing state.

NBC News:

Four years ago, Wisconsin arguably was the state where Donald Trump came the closest to overturning the election results.

A barrage of lawsuits aimed at invalidating hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic votes in the crucial battleground sought to take advantage of certain election policies in the state related to absentee ballots that were cast early and by confined or disabled voters, as well as those where election workers completed certain missing information on the envelopes.

The effort made its way all the way to the state Supreme Court, then controlled by conservatives, which ruled by one vote against Trump’s bid to overturn the results.

And yet, heading into the next presidential election, lawmakers in Wisconsin have done little to prevent a similar scenario from playing out again in the event of a close race.

State lawmakers have failed to enact any measures that would serve to clarify the nuances of absentee ballots that Trump, now the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, attempted to exploit. They also have not closed loopholes that could provide allies of the former president with openings to insert conspiracy theories and misinformation.

And the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees elections in the state, has issued pieces of modest guidance, but remains flooded with partisan attacks and efforts to impeach its top official.

That all stands in contrast to other swing states that were also targeted by Trump allies in the wake of the 2020 election. In Michigan, Democratic lawmakers have implemented broad reforms to election security and ballot counting. And in Pennsylvania, the Democratic governor recently rolled out an election security task force designed to mitigate threats to the vote this year.

But in Wisconsin, many of the same obstacles, questions and gray areas — regarding drop boxes, disabled and elderly voters, ballot processing and, perhaps most importantly, the protection of an election oversight apparatus that has been inundated by threats and attacks — remain unaddressed, alarming election workers and watchdogs in the state.

“Statewide, I don’t see a lot of change,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, the top election official in Wisconsin’s second-most populous county. “It’s not like something dramatically different has happened here,” added McDonell, a Democrat.

Jay Heck, the executive director Common Cause Wisconsin, the state’s branch of the national nonpartisan government watchdog group, added that the consequences could be dire if the right mix of circumstances were to emerge on or following Election Day.

“It could all explode,” he said.