Election official turnover is nearly 40% in some states, new report shows. Workers quit to avoid 2024 conflicts.

Election official have left their jobs to avoid 2024
conspiracies. (Photo by Elliott Stallion, Unsplash)

Underpaid, overworked, and sometimes threatened or harassed, many election officials have left their jobs rather than face the 2024 election cycle. Some states face a dramatic shift of experienced workers leaving and taking their expertise with them. "In some battleground states, more than half of the local election administrators will be new since the last presidential race, according to a new report from the democracy-focused advocacy group Issue One," reports Miles Parks of NPR. 

Overall election official turnover is "notoriously hard to come by — but experts have been saying for years that they worried about a mass exodus driven by the polarized environment," Parks reports. The Issue One report focused on 11 western states and "found that the problem of voting official turnover is particularly acute in the region's swing states, where conspiracies have flourished. . . . More than 160 chief local election officials — nearly 40% of the region's officials — have left their positions. Experts say they expect to see a similar trend in other states as well, as recent polling and NPR's own reporting have indicated many people in these roles fear for their or their colleagues' safety."

Marine veteran Josh Daniels, a Republican who became an election official in Utah County, Utah, in 2019, "grew to love the complex minutiae that went into running an election. . . . But when the time came to decide whether to run for reelection in 2022, Daniels decided against it. Voting conspiracies had become too much to take." Daniels told Parks: "It was just exhausting. It really was like "The Twilight Zone" of government service. "Groundhog Day". . . every day you wake up, and it's the same thing over and over again. It doesn't matter how much information and data you share; it doesn't matter how many concerns you answer. There will just be a new group of critics to again dish out the new conspiracy of the day."

With so much knowledge walking out the door and inexperienced officials filling the gap, a new problem surfaces -- the number of human errors new employees make while learning their roles. "Issue One found that the officials who left took with them more than 1,800 years of experience. . . . New voting officials make more mistakes than seasoned ones. So the exodus brought on by election conspiracies may beget more conspiracies, as first-time honest mistakes are treated like evidence of malfeasance."