One Change To Make: How U.S. Local Election Officials Would Improve Elections

• In Event: Local Election Administration and the Voter Experience

Abstract

The United States election system will experience a wave of legal and administrative reforms following the highly competitive and contentious 2020 contest, as political actors, administrators, and activists try to seize the agenda and promote solutions to problems—both real and perceived—in local and state election administration.

One voice that can be easily overlooked in a period of rapid policy change is that of the street level administrator—the more the 10,000 local election officials who are on the front lines of administering and defending our election system. EVIC has been assembling a unique dataset that will help illuminate how LEOs view election reform: three years of open-ended survey items that were part of the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College LEO Surveys.

In each year, we asked LEOs a “one change” question; “If there is one change you could make that would help you run a more efficient, secure, and fair election, what would it be?” Our experience across the three waves of this survey is that LEOs are not shy about sharing their opinions and responding in the open-ended format, and we have reported some anecdotal responses from these open ended items (e.g. complaints about lack of consultation by legislatures; worries about budgetary support). We are ready to move our analysis to a more systematic and structured exploration of these unique and invaluable survey responses.

In this paper, we propose to conduct content analysis of these responses, identifying common themes, reform ideas, and pain points. To the degree we can find systematic and informative patterns in these responses, we will then explore whether there are significant dimensions of variation in the responses, notably size of jurisdiction; “top down” vs. “bottom up” state election systems; and method of LEO selection (elective vs. appointive). Ultimately, we are interested not just in the content of what LEOs suggest, but also any evidence that may have that reforms are an exogenous shock that LEOs are responding to, or whether LEOs appear to anticipate (and advocate) for reforms that are eventually put in place.

Authors

• Paul Gronke, Reed College

• Paul Manson, Reed College