Also appearing in Electionline Weekly
The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) Local Election Official (LEO) Survey has been conducted annually from 2018-2024, except in 2021. This coverage over time has allowed our research team to identify trends and changes in the election official community across two midterm and two presidential election cycles.
A deeper dive into job satisfaction provided in this policy brief shows a very worrisome trend – a steep and enduring decline in job satisfaction among LEOs serving in the smallest (< 5,001 registered voters) jurisdictions. These differences remain robust even in the face of other features of the work environment.
This brief shows that we can identify three independent drivers of job satisfaction. One is changes in workload, and the second is experiences with threats and harassment. The third is jurisdiction size, but as a causal factor, that driver remains not fully understood.
Ultimately, this policy brief shows how critical it is not to lose focus on the very distinctive nature of the 56% of American LEOs who occupy positions in the smallest jurisdictions. While these LEOs serve a small proportion of voters nationwide, they are the face of democracy to millions of Americans living in townships and rural areas. They want to deliver democracy to their citizens, just like election administrators in larger jurisdictions, but these results show how deeply impacted they have been by changes in workload and a toxic political climate.
The Context: Declining Job Satisfaction since 2020
One important finding in our most recent report is a substantial decline in overall job satisfaction, something we have been measuring since 2020. The impact of the 2020 election and its aftermath is quite apparent, showing a drop of 13% overall, which has been sustained over time.
The EVIC team spent some time in our report discussing the importance of job satisfaction and why this drop is concerning:
We track job satisfaction because it is a leading indicator of workforce stability. High job satisfaction contributes to effective performance, stability, and resilience in the face of growing challenges … improving LEO job satisfaction can help address issues like retention, workload management, and training management…
This policy brief was initially intended to do a deeper dive into the causes and consequences of lower job satisfaction, echoing some of the same themes that researchers Yuguo Liao and David Kimball explored in their policy brief on public service motivations and election official turnover. However, as sometimes happens in research, rather than finding solutions, I have managed to unearth a deeper puzzle. This larger puzzle is the focus of this policy brief.
The Puzzle: A Disturbing Trend of Lower Job Satisfaction in the Smallest Jurisdictions
The overall trend disguises three distinct patterns of change over time in job satisfaction among local election officials:
- LEOs in the largest jurisdictions (> 100,000 registered voters) reported the largest drop in job satisfaction – nearly 20 points – from 2020 to 2022, but also experienced the most recovery by 2024, ending the period about where they started.
- LEOs in the mid-sized jurisdictions (5,001-25,000 and 25,001-100,000 registered voters) reported a 10-point decline in job satisfaction after 2020. Job satisfaction among these mid-sized jurisdictions has recovered somewhat, but remains lower.
- LEOs in the smallest jurisdictions (5,000 registered voters and fewer) show the most distinctive – and most worrisome – trend of all. Job satisfaction in this segment dropped 16 points from 2020 to 2022, then dropped another 3 points in both 2023 and 2024.
First, I leveraged the statistical power of our repeated surveys by “stacking” the 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024 surveys and fitting statistical models to examine change within each year and over time. The models started simply, with measures for jurisdiction size, year, and an interaction of the two, creating statistical estimates of the changes seen in the line chart.
Subsequent models added other indicators – gender, race, partisanship, appointive/elective, and region – in an attempt to make the size differences “go away.” In statistical jargon, I added variables that may be correlated with jurisdiction size (in each year) and that change over time, to see if they are the real cause of job satisfaction.
The results from this analysis were that the initial estimates from the simple model were largely unchanged. The decline in job satisfaction among the smallest jurisdictions in 2022 and 2023 (and the drop in the 5,001-25,000 in 2022) remains the largest and most statistically significant.
My second strategy was to do a “deep dive” into job satisfaction using the 2024 EVIC LEO Survey, which includes a set of questions about change in work hours from non-election periods (highest in the smallest jurisdictions), length of time in their current position (also higher in smaller jurisdictions), confidence in the integrity of the national vote count, and reported levels of harassment. This last measure goes the “wrong way” – our data show that threats and harassment are higher in larger jurisdictions – but we can use a statistical technique called an “interaction term” to tease out different impacts of experiencing harassment, even if the level of harassment is lower.
These models were successful in predicting different levels of job satisfaction among local election administrators. Variables predicting lower levels of job satisfaction are:
- Longer tenure in current position
- Higher perceived increases in workload (strongly statistically significant)
- Experiences with harassment and abuse
- Being a LEO in the smallest jurisdiction
To take a closer look at the complexity of some of these relationships, the plots below show how harassment and change in workloads impact job satisfaction. These figures were produced using a statistical technique called “ordered logistic regression” that predicts the probability of giving one of five different responses, running from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.” The panel on the left plots the responses for LEOs who do not report threats and harassment, and the panel on the right plots the responses for LEOs who do report threats and harassment.
- The probability of responding “very satisfied” is much higher for those who have not experienced threats and harassment. For example, the predicted probability of answering “very satisfied” among those who experienced no harassment and the maximum increase in workload is higher than that of those who experienced harassment and reported no increases in workload.
- Among those who did not experience threats and harassment, increases in workload mostly reduce the probability of responding “very satisfied” and increase the probability of answering “neutral” and “somewhat dissatisfied.”
- Among those who did experience threats and harassment, increases in workload are associated with a decline in the probability of both of the “positive” responses and an increased probability of answering “neutral” or “somewhat dissatisfied.”
- Almost no LEOs tell us that they are “very dissatisfied.”
The Takeaway: Workload Increases and Harassment Significantly Reduce Job Satisfaction, but More Work Needs to be Done to Understand the Smallest Jurisdictions
These results provide valuable insight into some of the correlates of job satisfaction, but they still do not explain why LEOs in the smallest jurisdictions – independent of these other considerations – continue to report the lowest levels of job satisfaction.
The substantial decline in job satisfaction from 2020 to 2024 among LEOs serving voters in the smallest jurisdictions, and the lower levels in 2024 (10-15 points below medium and large-sized jurisdictions), remains an important puzzle to be explored.
What might be potential causes? EVIC has been conducting in-depth interviews with election officials who have helped us identify some possibilities for differences between LEOs in smaller jurisdictions versus larger ones:
- Less Likely to be Insulated: For LEOs in the smallest jurisdictions, relationships with their voters are much more personal, and so questions about election administration and integrity can become deeply personal as well. While these challenges impact LEOs in larger jurisdictions, those officials may be able to insulate themselves more in their personal, non-work lives.
- Lack of Staff Support: LEOs in the smallest jurisdictions are mostly one-person operations and are likely more impacted by new and increasing demands.
- Resource Limitations: Relatedly, our interviewees from smaller jurisdictions are much more likely to point to resource limitations that restrict their ability to respond to change.
Ultimately, this policy brief raises new questions even as it provides some answers. More difficult job conditions and experience with threats and harassment have had a strongly negative impact on the working conditions of local election administrators and their staff and have been a cause of increasing retirements and departures. More work needs to be done to track the work conditions in local offices and how they change over time.