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….