‘Ripe for political violence’: US election
officials are quitting at an alarming rate
North Carolina, a critical swing state, is seeing
rapid changes in election law, placing extra stress on new officials trying to
grasp how the system works
Daniel
Walton
Sun 30 Jul
2023 06.00 EDT
The first
job many people take out of college usually doesn’t come with a lot of
responsibility. Adam Byrnes’s first job is to make sure democracy works in a
critical US swing state.
Before
graduating with a political science degree from Emory University, Byrnes, 21,
applied to be the director of elections for Swain county, a mountainous region
of about 14,000 people in western North Carolina. He was offered the job before
he had a diploma in hand and started at the end of May. He’s currently
preparing for municipal elections in the county seat of Bryson City, which take
place in November, while also laying the foundations for the 2024 presidential
contest.
Although
he’d worked with an on-campus civic engagement organization and an outside
group that researched voter access in Georgia, Byrnes quickly learned that
those outward-facing concerns were just the tip of the electoral iceberg.
“Administratively,
there’s a lot to learn. For instance, right now we’re dealing with mid-year
campaign finance reports,” he explained. “When you’re in a civic engagement
group, that’s not really something you deal with.”
The
decentralized system of elections in the United States places a lot of
responsibility on county-level officials like Byrnes. And while he may be North
Carolina’s youngest election director, he’s far from the only one learning the
ropes during a crucial period for American democracy.
Over the
last four years, at least 40 of North Carolina’s 100 counties have had to
replace their election directors due to retirements, resignations and other
career moves. Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the state Board of Elections,
said that’s a significantly greater level of turnover than the state has seen
before.
Directors are retiring and they’re not coming back.
That’s a lot of knowledge lost
Corinne Duncan
Similar
trends hold true across the rest of the United States. A Boston Globe analysis
of data from the US Vote Foundation found that county election official
turnover had spiked after the 2020 election in battleground states like
Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. According to a 2022 survey by the
nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, 20% of officials serving at the time said
they planned to leave their posts before the 2024 presidential contest.
Those
filling the vacancies are entering a high-pressure environment, especially in
North Carolina, where Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden by fewer than 75,000
votes. Over 25% of the state’s county election directors have personally
experienced threats, according to a March poll by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Election Data and Science Lab, and 85% say their work-related
stress has grown since 2019.
New
election workers will help manage a voting system that’s among the most complex
in the world, said David Becker, executive director of the Washington-based
Center for Election Innovation & Research, a non-profit that works to build
trust in the electoral process.
That
system, Becker said, includes many checks and balances to ensure the outcome
reflects the will of the people. Votes are counted carefully, and rates of
fraud are negligible. He said he’s confident that even if those running the
system have less experience than before, the candidate who gets the most votes
will win.
No election
is perfect, however. Inexperienced officials may take longer than usual to
release election results or make minor administrative missteps. And in the
current political environment, Becker said, bad actors can spin those hiccups
into dangerous conspiracy theories.
“That could
create a very volatile period of time where there are efforts to delay the
counting and intimidate people who are counting ballots, delay the
certification and intimidate people who are in charge of certification and
perhaps delay or obstruct the meeting of the Electoral College members in each
state,” he added. “All of which are unlikely to stop the duly elected
individual from being declared the winner of the presidency, but could create a
volatile situation that’s ripe for political violence.”
North
Carolina’s elections in particular are undergoing a period of rapid change,
which may place extra stress on new officials trying to grasp how the system
works. For example, the state’s 2023 municipal elections will be first in which
citizens must present identification in order to vote. The voter ID law had
been struck down as racially biased by a Democratic-controlled supreme court in
2022, but after Republicans took control of the court this year, they
overturned the previous ruling.
Josh Jones,
who in 2022 became the director of elections for Greene county, said he expects
voter ID to be controversial at the polls this year. Although the state’s
voters backed a referendum on the requirement in 2018, many voting rights
groups say the measure will harm Black and Latino residents.
“As
elections officials and poll workers, we have to follow the law,” Jones said.
“My hope is that the voting public, when they come to vote, realize that our
election officials and poll workers are doing just that, following the law.”
Yet the
rules aren’t always crystal clear, and election officials are often tasked with
deciding how to put them into practice. Corinne Duncan, director of elections
in Buncombe county since 2020, said the role has gained more responsibility in
recent years as election law has become more complicated.
“We’re in
charge of interpreting the law, which is unique. And law in the United States
is a lot about case law and application,” Duncan said. “The longer that you’ve
been around and seen how the law plays out, the more effective of a leader you
are.”
When
veteran directors leave, that leadership capacity leaves with them. And because
each type of election only comes around once every four years, Duncan pointed
out, new directors need a lot of time to build up practical experience in
voting law.
At the end of the day, if we do everything right and
people still don’t like it, there’s not anything we can do
Adam Byrnes
“Directors are retiring and they’re not coming back.
That’s a lot of knowledge lost,” Duncan said.
North
Carolina’s legislature has proposed a series of bills that would introduce even
more wrinkles into how officials are required to run elections. Republicans
hold a supermajority in both the state House and Senate and can pass those
changes without support from Democratic lawmakers or Roy Cooper, the Democratic
governor.
Some
elements of those bills seem likely to spark conflict, said Michella Huff, who
has overseen elections in Surry county since 2019. She pointed to House Bill
772, which would allow observers appointed by county political parties to move
freely around polling locations, record poll workers and stand just 5ft away as
voters cast their ballots. Officials could be charged with misdemeanors if they
interfere with poll observers, so new elections directors might give them freer
rein than the rules allow.
“When I try
to envision what that will look like, I do not see how that is not voter
intimidation,” Huff said. “It’s going to cause some disruption to the process.”
None of the
proposed bills provide new resources or financial support for county election
officials, said Gannon with the state board of elections. In fact, budget
constraints have led the board to cut four of its eight security and support
technicians – experts who help train new election directors and provide advice
to counties – since 2020.
The
legislature is currently developing North Carolina’s budget for 2023-25. The
state board has requested more than $7.6m in new funds over that period to
“ensure the smooth implementation of” the voter ID law, as well as over $13.6m
to update software systems it calls “antiquated, inefficient, and vulnerable to
defects”. Without these resources, new officials will have a harder time making
sure the new rules are applied consistently and fairly.
“We have
been told that all those matters are being considered by budget negotiators,”
Gannon said, although lawmakers have yet to release a draft of the spending
plan. “We will continue to work with legislators to make sure they understand
potential effects on election administration of any proposed statutory changes,
as we do routinely.”
Regardless
of these headwinds, North Carolina’s elections officials are trying to build
trust in advance of 2024. In Swain county, Byrnes said he’s worked with local
media to share details about the new voter ID requirements before polling
starts and is meeting with both Republican and Democratic leaders in the area
to build good lines of communication.
Despite
being new to the job and having to run his first presidential election, he said
he feels confident that he will be prepared.
“At the end
of the day, if we do everything right and people still don’t like it, there’s
not anything we can do,” he said. “It’s important to just control what
we can.”
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