Turnover among the country’s election officials has continued to increase — now nearly five years after Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 contest led to voting officials facing more pressure and harassment.
Some 2 in 5 of all the local officials who administered the 2020 election left their jobs before the 2024 cycle, according to research out Tuesday from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The trend was especially pronounced in large jurisdictions, where the Trump campaign’s misinformation about voting often focused.
“This is in alignment with the challenges, burnout, threats and harassment that election officials are facing,” said Rachel Orey, who oversees the center’s Elections Project.For the past two decades turnover in the elections field had been increasing gradually, but the new report, which Orey worked on with UCLA researchers Joshua Ferrer and Daniel Thompson, shows how 2020 amplified the trend.
Orey first worked with Ferrer and Thompson last year to analyze a novel dataset that included more than 18,000 local election officials across more than 6,000 jurisdictions. Their initial report showed a turnover rate that rose from 28% in 2004 to 39% in 2022.
In 2024, the turnover rate increased to 41%, the highest it’s been in at least the last 25 years.
“Rising turnover is almost like a canary in the coal mine, indicating that something deeper and more structural in the way that we conduct elections needs to be fixed,” said Orey, noting specifically that elections in the U.S. are chronically underfunded….