An election observer monitors two poll workers processing absentee ballots. (Photo by Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline.)
Ohio’s local election workers are overworked, underpaid and strained by conspiratorial attacks, and the state could be doing more to leave politics out of the election process, according to a voting rights group who talked with local election administrators.
All Voting is Local Ohio partnered with research firm Public Circle, LLC, to study the evolution of the work election administrators at the local level do as they prepare for another highly-contested election.
“Today, these professionals are straining under the weight of back-to-back statewide special elections and rhetorical attacks on their trustworthiness, character and patriotism,” the report stated.
More complex elections, technological advancements and increased voter education needs have piled on to a load local election directors say only grows bigger every year. Add to that a “politicization” of elections, including claims of voter fraud and mass voter challenges, and “hidden costs” arise, according to the authors of the election workforce report.
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“It affects workers, it affects voters, and at the end of the day, there are dollar-and-cents concerns for taxpayers,” said Dean Jackson, principal for Public Circle and researcher on the project.
The report was inspired by conversations with Ohio’s boards of elections, according to Kayla Griffin-Green, Ohio’s state director for All Voting is Local.
“I felt like their voices were really going unnoticed,” Griffin-Green said.
Over the first three months of this year, 29 election officials were interviewed, covering 20 of Ohio’s 88 counties and all regions in the state, Jackson said.
Throughout the interviews, local workers emphasized the bipartisan nature of running an election office, remarking on the fact that significant parts of the offices can’t be accessed unless at “Republican key” and a “Democratic key” are used.
“This really is a group of people from both parties trying to make sure the process runs the way it’s supposed to,” Jackson said.
Going through the process of meeting the deadlines for an election, which takes about 120 days for an election of any size, according to the administrators, is enough of a task without questions about election integrity and nefarious deeds within the offices.
“Claims that you could somehow flood the election with illegally cast ballots, it just doesn’t work that way,” Jackson said. “If you talk to administrators, they spend a lot of their time trying to explain to the public how robust the process is, and why it would be very difficult to pull that off, especially considering, once again, that everything is done on this bipartisan basis.”
The “hidden costs” talked about in the report come from those election workers sometimes forgoing time off because of extra work, the result of 10 elections over the course of three years. The work of those elections didn’t just include ensuring ballot machines were up and running and keeping voters informed. For many, the job now includes outreach work, trainings on de-escalation and on the drug overdose treatment Narcan, after envelopes laced with fentanyl were sent to election offices in other states.
The stress and complexity of modern elections is enough to create high turnover and low recruitment rates, on top of pay levels for some election positions that aren’t standardized.
“Often they’re set at a level that reflects 20 years ago, when this was a much simpler, maybe even part-time role,” Jackson said.
The report’s recommendations include having a crisis response and communications plan, and established chains of communication between law enforcement and polling places.
“That’s something they should start working on yesterday,” Jackson said.
Ohio has seen mass voter challenges that have strained resources for even some larger offices, including Wood County who saw 16,000 voter challenges brought by a single person, according to Griffin-Green. Those challenges have not amounted to broad swaths of voters being taken off the rolls, but have caused workers to put aside other deadlines to pore through the lists in response to the individual challenges.
The fact that these voter challenges are happening in more states shows a need for modernization of the system, among other longterm goals, according to Jackson.
“I think it just goes to show that if we don’t invest in election administration, it gets worse through no fault of the people doing it,” Jackson said.
Preserving the “exhaustible resource,” as the report calls the election workforce, has to include investment from municipal governments, all the way up to state lawmakers and the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office.
That should involve consolidating the elections calendar to eliminating unpredictability, including August special elections, which the report found was “the chief complaint of election administrators regardless of political affiliation.”
Griffin-Green and Jackson say the so-called “collaboration ban” passed into law in 2021 has created problems within the system, partly in trying to do too much while hindering some of the work of election administrators.
The law bans boards of elections from partnering with “nongovernmental” entities but the report recommended modifications (if not an outright repeal) to “more explicitly exempt a wider range of voter outreach activities or community partnerships meant to raise public awareness of voting laws, recruit a bipartisan pool of poll workers and educate voters on election safeguards.”
The ban could also be narrowed for “those activities most concerning to lawmakers while permitting others,” including allowing boards of election to look into “supplementary grants” for equipment.
“If you’re concerned about wealthy, private philanthropists from out of state funding activities that could be perceived as partisan, you can prohibit those but still allow people to buy photocopiers,” Jackson said.
Griffin-Green touched on the hot topic of drop boxes, which have been up for debate both in public and in the Ohio Supreme Court as the state and election advocates disagree over whether they should be allowed and if allowed, how many each county should have.
Part of a theme for the report, Griffin-Green said local workers should have their say.
“Election officials need to have the opportunity to choose what works best for their community,” Griffin-Green said.
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