Turnover of Local Election Officials

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Variability in Localized Election Administration

Abstract

A growing number of public officials, scholars, and journalists are concerned that increased scrutiny and threats are leading the people who run elections at the local level to leave office at higher rates than in the past. Are more local election officials leaving office today? To answer this question, we build an original, large-scale dataset containing the names and service tenures of county-level chief election officials in 41 states from 2000 to 2022, encompassing more than 7,200 officials serving in over 2,800 counties. In our preliminary analysis, we find that election official turnover was higher in 2022 than in the past, but the increase in 2022 is only a modest break from a long-running trend of increasing turnover in the profession over the past two decades. Despite the concern that increases in turnover will degrade the quality of local election administration, we find that election performance is remarkably resilient in the face of leadership changes. Using a variety of difference-in-differences approaches, we find that losing an election official prior to an election does not substantially affect participation. If our findings hold after we extend our data to 2024 and all 50 states, we take them to suggest that a shift in focus is needed, away from the most recent and salient causes for increased election official turnover and towards the factors that have increased turnover over the long run.

Authors

• Daniel Thompson, UCLA

• Joshua Ferrer, UCLA