Voting officials are leaving their jobs at the highest rate in decades

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.

A recent survey of voting officials conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, for instance, found that 1 in 5 election officials have had a budget request denied, and 4 out of 5 officials are concerned to some degree about recent federal funding cuts targeting election security programs.

In recent years, those funding challenges have been combined with an information war about election officials’ processes — one that looks like it will continue at least through next year’s midterms.

On Monday, President Trump made numerous false claims about elections, and indicated his administration was drafting an executive order that would attempt to ban mail-in voting as well as the machines local election officials use to tabulate ballots.

Legal experts say such actions would be unconstitutional, but even if ultimately halted by the courts, they could still serve to diminish the credibility of the election system and justify future challenges.

“The danger of interference in the midterm elections is real, and this is a dangerous step in this direction,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election expert at UCLA, on Monday in reaction to Trump’s claims.

Still, even with a torrent of false information last year, the 2024 election was widely considered an administrative success: Survey data found almost 9 in 10 voters felt it was run well.

Orey said that should give the public confidence that even as voting officials face new challenges, including unprecedented turnover, they are still able to administer fair elections.

“We have seen election officials step up to the plate,” Orey said. “To create new recruitment pipelines and expand and improve training programs to ensure that new election officials have the knowledge, skills and abilities they need to do their jobs well.”

The researchers found that close to 60% of the people replacing those who left still had experience working in elections in some capacity, and almost 80% had prior experience working in government.