Spurred by distrust caused by false beliefs, county clerks and other election officials are getting out of the line of work

A woman votes in May in Louisville.
(Photo by Matt Stone/Courier Journal)

County clerks and other election officials in several states have stepped away from their jobs at a higher than usual rate this year and some of those retirees say that increasing distrust of their work by election conspiracy theorists played into their decisions to leave.

This year, nine county clerks in Kentucky (which has 120 counties) retired before the end of their term, and another 13 clerks decided to not seek reelection; only two clerks retired in 2020, Morgan Watkins reports for the Louisville Courier Journal. 

"They say it’s everything," said Michael Adams, Kentucky's Republican secretary of state, on what he heard from outgoing clerks. "The job is harder, people are less friendly and more accusatory. . . . A lot of them have been doing this for a long time, and they're just tired."

In Texas, about one-third of election administrators have left their jobs in the past two years, reports Jeremy Schwartz for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. In August, the entire staff of the elections office in Gillespie County (Fredericksburg) resigned while saying they faced threats, a lack of resources and "dangerous misinformation." In Bexar County (San Antonio), the elections administrator told KSAT that her department felt they were "under attack. Threats, meanness, ugliness."

Clerks still in their jobs say they've had to dedicate more time this year to a mountain of records requests fishing for fraud in their practices. Last month, Oregon's secretary of state said county clerks there were straining under an avalanche of requests and threats of litigation, Andrew Selsky reported for the Associated Press. In another AP story by Nicholas Riccardi, clerks in multiple states all said the same, adding that many of the requests are sent at the behest of right-wing political pundits. 

"These aren’t people with specific grievances," Michael Henrici, the commissioner of elections in New York's Otsego County, told AP. "They’re getting a form letter from someone’s podcast and sometimes filling in the blanks."