Blog

Why equity should be at the center of 2020 elections coverage

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August 26, 2020

Racial equity is the defining issue of this year, of this generation, and as a result, of the 2020 U.S. elections. Nationwide uprisings and protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd have demanded system changes to policing and incited a reckoning within newsrooms about their own systemic racism. As the journalists in these newsrooms increasingly turn their attention to election coverage, it’s important that they keep the focus on equity and seek ways to center historically marginalized communities. We need to hear directly from the people who are most affected by these issues.

It’s not a moment too soon. Racist conspiracy theories are now circulating to attack the credibility of vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris — the first Black female vice presidential candidate as well as the first Asian American.

And layered on top are the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to disenfranchise voters that disproportionately affect communities of color. Voter suppression has only increased since the pandemic, with deliberate attempts by Republicans and conservative commentators to limit mail-in voting, fear-monger, and sow uncertainty about voters’ ability to get to the polls and for their votes to count.

For all these intersecting reasons, it’s important to understand why traditional election coverage falls short on serving historically marginalized communities and what we can do to make a change in 2020.

Why Traditional Election Coverage Fails

The United States’ long tradition of election coverage relies heavily on pundits and polling: “horse race” coverage filled with stats and numbers that make audiences feel they have an insider read on who will come out ahead. But what about the issues people are facing in their everyday lives? To figure out what people care about, mainstream coverage relies heavily on polling, which rarely provides the full picture. Polling before an election often takes non-representative samples of “likely voters” (e.g., leaving out new voters), and can leave out significant portions of the population due to language barriers or differing communication methods. The same is true for exit polling: responses depend on who is asking the question, and how, to whom, and whether the person feels comfortable responding. Traditional coverage, particularly cable and broadcast news, also relies on the perspective of pundits as experts. These pundits historically do not represent the lived experiences of other Americans — particularly Americans who aren’t rich, white, male, and close to power.

There’s a Better Way

Media scholar Jay Rosen has been writing about alternatives to these traditional practices for quite a while. He proposes a straightforward approach: ask voters what they think candidates should be talking about in the election, whether national, state, or local.

Ask voters what they think candidates should be talking about in the election, whether national, state, or local.

By February 2020, we saw the success and potential of this approach in real life, and Democracy Fund made a grant to this collaborative effort to launch what’s now called Election SOS: a non-partisan project that trains journalists to provide election coverage that serves community information needs using the citizens agenda approach and tried-and-true principles of engagement and trust-building.

Election SOS deepens and expands on The Citizens Agenda guide by providing essential training, guidance, and coaching to journalists on pressing topics like fighting misinformation, building trust, and protecting election integrity. They are partnering with a wide network of experts in journalism and within specific issue areas, including the American Press Institute (fiscal sponsor), First Draft News, ProPublica, PEN America, Troll Busters, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Vote.org, and More in Common — just to name a few.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Read about over 20 newsrooms who have put the citizens agenda into action thanks to Election SOS training. Some highlights:

  • Vox Media published a video explainer on horse race coverage and invited viewers to inform their future coverage.
  • The Capital Times in Madison, WI is developing a People’s Agenda in both English and ​Spanish​ so that the community can set its own priorities.
  • Washington City Paper developed a voter guide for the 2020 DC Democratic primary. A grant from the Solutions Journalism Network allowed them to reach out to readers and incorporate responses from 200 people to inform questions for candidates.
  • WBEZ in Chicago created and published a citizens agenda titled ​12 Questions For The Candidates In Illinois’ 6th Congressional District​.”

These engagement practices are an important part of challenging the status quo of typical elections coverage. And newsrooms must continue to make an intentional effort to get input from historically marginalized people within the communities they serve, or engaged journalism will replicate the same inequities we see in traditional reporting.

What Funders Can Do

Projects like Election SOS are critical to ensuring that journalists and newsrooms are prepared to meet the information needs of their communities, now through Election Week and beyond. Funders can further support this work by:

  • Investing in newsrooms directly to publish election coverage that centers the information needs of communities.
  • Supporting news outlets led by and serving diverse and historically marginalized communities to support their elections and pandemic reporting. (You can use the DEI Tracker to identify outlets and organizations.)
  • Funding collaborative efforts such as Your Voice Ohio, a network of over 40 news organizations publishing community-centered election coverage and holding community engagement events across the state (now virtual).

The decisions that voters make will impact a wide variety of critical issues facing our democracy, and funders must help ensure that our electorate reflects the diversity of our nation. One crucial part of this is ensuring every person, especially those from historically marginalized communities that have been excluded for far too long, has the information they need to vote.

 

Thanks to Jessica Clark.

Blog

Understanding Trust to Strengthen Democracy

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August 21, 2017

This blog was co-authored by Francesca Mazzola, Associate Director at FSG.

Three Important Lessons About Trust

At Democracy Fund, we have been exploring questions of trust. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low. In 2016, for example, only 32% of Americans said they had a “Great Deal” or “Fair Amount of Trust” in mass media, the lowest level of trust in Gallup polling history.

Meanwhile, research suggests (1) that higher levels of trust lead to: a) greater confidence in trusted individuals or institutions and b) a willingness to act based on that confidence. In the context of our national relationship to the news media, for instance, this implies that a significant majority of Americans may not be willing to act civically or otherwise based on the information provided by mass media outlets.

Given that democracies function best when individuals participate in the civic process (e.g. voting, running for office, volunteering), it is clear that the current low level of trust in public institutions (including, but not only, the media) is a problem in need of attention. A healthy democracy requires institutions that are both trustworthy and trusted.

As we’ve been investigating the notion of trust, three important lessons have become apparent to us:

1. Trust has both cognitive and affective dimensions

Think about someone you trust. Now think about the reasons why you trust that person. More than likely, they have a good “track record” of having been there for you when you needed them. In addition, you probably have an emotional bond with them that allows you to be vulnerable. This exemplifies the two dimensions of trust – cognitive and affective. (2)

Cognitive trust has been described as “trusting from the head.” It includes factors such as dependability, predictability, and reputation. Affective trust, on the other hand, involves having mutual care and concern or emotional bonds. This has been described as “trusting from the heart.” Most trusting relationships have both cognitive and affective aspects that often reinforce one another.

2. Trust and trustworthiness are not the same

One way to understand trust is that it is a firm belief (cognitive and affective) in the goodness of something (we use the word “goodness” deliberately here, as dictionary definitions of trust tend to use descriptors of trustworthiness instead). We are often willing to trust people, companies, and institutions because we believe they are good, at least in the context in which we trust them.

Trustworthiness is a related, but different notion. Trustworthiness is defined as the perceived likelihood that a particular trustee will uphold one’s trust. (3) Like trust, it also has cognitive dimensions (such as competence, credibility, and reliability) and affective dimensions (such as ethics and positive intentions) that signal that the trustee “has what it takes” to meet the trustor’s needs and uphold their trust.

Imagine your interaction with your bank. Though you don’t necessarily need to trust the bank (i.e. believe in its “goodness”) as you would trust a spouse or a close friend, you must believe that the bank is trustworthy – i.e., it completes your transaction as intended, obeys laws, and follows a code of ethics. But you have to have trust in the overall monetary and financial system to even feel safe opening a bank account – something that was adversely affected after the financial crisis.

3. Trustworthiness and trust have a counter-intuitive relationship

A rational point of view of the relationship between trustworthiness and trust would suggest that when you first encounter a system, you make an assessment of its trustworthiness (e.g., competence, predictability), and then you calibrate your level of trust accordingly.

But, alas, human beings are anything but rational. The evidence around human cognition and reasoning increasingly points to a counter-intuitive relationship: often, we enter into a new relationship (with a person or a system) with a level of trust that is influenced by the “bubbles” (i.e. communities and networks populated by like-minded folks) that we inhabit.

From there, we look for information to confirm our initial instincts (often referred to as “confirmation bias”). The type of information we look for or prioritize (e.g., cognitive vs. affective factors) varies by individual and by situation. This phenomenon help us understand, for instance, why individuals trust a news source that is perceived to be more aligned with their political views.

What this means

In the light of these dynamics, improving the trustworthiness of a system is often necessary and vital, but perhaps insufficient as a way to build public trust. Of course, we want to prevent a crisis of trustworthiness from eroding trust. For instance, public trust in Japan’s institutions suffered a severe blow as a result of the government’s bungled response to the Fukushima disaster in 2011. But, ensuring trustworthiness on its own may not be enough to overcome the contextual forces that undermine trust in the first place.

Furthermore, some efforts to improve trustworthiness, such as technical improvements to a system, are shown to decrease trust in the short-term, by introducing unpredictability as people have to navigate an unfamiliar tool or process. As we will discuss in the next part of this post, these complicated dynamics will have to be kept in mind as one tries to navigate the work of re-building trust in democratic institutions.

How We Are Strengthening Trust and Trustworthiness

For the Democracy Fund, and anyone else working on improving American democracy, it is hard to ignore the fact that trust in institutions is remarkably low by historical standards. This is especially true for Democracy Fund’s three main areas of focus – media and journalism, Congress, and elections. There are several factors that have led to this. For instance, our Congress and Public Trust systems map explores how the actions of members of Congress and their staff, the media, and the public interact to create the current state of Congress.

Previously, we talked a bit about why this decline in trust matters. The question now becomes, “can anything be done about it?” And in our efforts to do something about it, do we focus on trust, trustworthiness, or both?

The “trust matrix”

As we discussed previously, level of trust and assessment of trustworthiness are related, but different notions, and each has cognitive and affective dimensions. These concepts are organized below into what we’ve come to call the trust matrix. The matrix also provides labels (e.g., “personal affinity”) to help readers easily navigate the differences among categories of concepts.

Implications for Democracy Fund

We recognize that in order to restore trust in democratic institutions, we need to work on multiple fronts. This by no means an easy task. Philanthropy, in general, tends to focus on solutions that address trustworthiness. For instance, an effort to improve education may focus primarily on educator competencies, or work to create a set of proficiency standards.

This may be because it can be a lot harder to affect people’s personal affinity for individuals or institutions, or public perceptions of individuals’ or institutions’ characters. While there may be few “tried and true” methods to address these factors, they are nonetheless important pieces in affecting individuals’ trust in systems and institutions. At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that there are potential ethical implications with influencing people’s belief systems, and hence a responsible framework needs to be considered.

As we grapple with the myriad of intricacies here, we are beginning to come to terms with what types of approaches may fit under each quadrant of trust matrix. Below are some early hypotheses:

  1. Trustworthiness: We must increase the trustworthiness of institutions by equipping key stakeholders with better tools and practices (cognitive), and the promulgation and adoption of better standards and ethics (affective). For our elections work, this might mean identifying standards and promoting security in election systems, and providing election officials with the resources they need to maintain system integrity. Any failure within our election system could seriously undermine public trust. For our media and journalism work, this may mean re-thinking how we make the case for fundamental facts and combat misinformation, as well as working on practices around transparency and corrections.
  2. Level of Trust: We also need to tackle the trust deficit through strategies that speak directly to the public through engagement tools (cognitive) and the use of bonding and identification (affective). For our elections work, this may mean empowering the right messengers with tools and tactics to improve voter confidence. For our media and journalism work, this may mean having specific strategies that emphasize improving trust among historically marginalized communities, and other groups with special attention to increasing the diversity and inclusion of sources, stories and staffing.

At a time when our democratic norms are often undermined, we hope that our work to strengthen trust in trustworthy institutions will help build public confidence and participation in our democracy. As we continue to develop and hone our approach, we look forward to learning and sharing more with the field.

Thanks to Marcie Parkhurst, Nikhil Bumb, and Jaclyn Marcatili from FSG for supporting the research that informed this piece.

 

Works Cited:

1. Kelton, Kari. “Trust in Digital Information.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2008): 363-74.

2. McAllister, D. J. “Affect- And Cognition-Based Trust As Foundations For Interpersonal Cooperation In Organizations.” Academy of Management Journal 38.1 (1995): 24-59

 

3. Colquitt, Jason A. “Justice, Trust, and Trustworthiness: A Longitudinal Analysis Integrating Three Theoretical Perspectives.” The Academy of Management Journal, vol. 54, no. 6, 1 Dec. 2011, pp. 1183–1206. JSTOR.

 

Blog

Invest in Listening Infrastructure

Sabrina Hersi Issa
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April 24, 2019

“Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”
— Gwen Ifill

As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.

Many opportunities for philanthropy to fund stronger, more resilient and diverse journalism ecosystems involves backtracking and investing in critical infrastructure to support those ecosystems and to formalize heretofore informal mechanisms that serve diverse audiences and communities. To date, this project has unpacked opportunities for media funders to support data infrastructure, adaptive leaders, reimagined newsroom spaces and how national issues are reported in local community narratives.

As Ifill’s quote explains and significant data pointing to the consistent struggle to develop and grow audience share in local communities where populations are steadily increasing, it can be argued that diverse audiences have “stopped listening” to mainstream news. But that does not mean diverse communities have stopped communicating messages, stories and narratives that deserve attention. For many communities that public square now lives online.

There is safety in small numbers and low levels of trust in technology platforms mean many meaningful conversations are unfolding in silo’ed corners of the Internet. It is up to journalists to meet diverse communities where they are and to invest in engagement not as a means for audience growth, but as mechanisms for listening to the voices gathered there and producing quality journalism that serves the public.

For the purposes of this research, listening infrastructure is defined as a collection of explicit processes, systems and tools intended to support a journalist’s capacity to monitor meaningful public conversations in online communities in order to increase human dimensions and depth in reporting.

The intention is essentially the definition and can be reverse-engineered through three questions:

1. How do journalists find meaningful conversations in online communities beyond their own?

2. How do journalists show up/conduct themselves in online communities beyond their own?

3. What do journalists use to continuously listen and learn from online communities beyond their own?

For local newsrooms the mechanisms to pay for resources that can systemize, improve and boost journalists ability to pay attention are cost-intensive, both in staff time and budget resources. The listening infrastructure that does exist is far from structured, effective or formalized and essentially boils down to social media monitoring subscriptions. As a result, individual reporters have their own individual systems and their own methods for discerning what gets their limited time, attention and energy. Often this boils down to attention being determined by push notifications, Nuzzel and curated Tweetdeck columns. In my research, I occasionally came across groups of journalists who covered similar beats, such as gun violence, and shared pooled resources as a means to both boost one another’s listening infrastructure and better cover a wide, disparate community with increasingly growing online community silos.

This is a challenge that exists in industry spaces beyond newsrooms. A substantial part of this research has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context. In the social change movement space, there is also a critical listening infrastructure gap. Social change movement organizations also tend to serve communities that largely exist online and struggle with continual misalignment between which communities they exist to serve and which communities their campaigns ultimately pay attention to.

In the ocean conservation space, those silos are even more prevalent and with extreme scarcity in funding, the barriers for collaboration among competitive organizations are even higher. In 2011 Rachel Weidinger founded Upwell, an effort to build a backbone for listening and measurement for the ocean conservation space that had previously not existed. The intention was to build listening infrastructure to be shared across organizations in order to better inform online campaigns, information sharing and collaborative community building. Upwell billed itself as the ‘PR agency for the ocean’ and broke ground developing innovative big listening practice: sifting through high volumes of news and online conversations for movements and pairing that big data with analysis and distributed network building.

Image of Upwell's map of online conversations about the ocean.
Image via Upwell.us

What was the outcome for all these buzzwords?

Conversation metrics rather than individual campaign level metrics. In a newsroom context, the outcome of an infrastructure like Upwell would look similar to this MIT Media Lab report analyzing the collective impact in online conversation and attention resulting from press coverage of stories like the shooting death of Trayvon Martin every single week. It also allowed for amplification and networking building on top of the analysis of online conversational metrics.

The existence of Upwell allowed online engagement within the ocean conservation space to shift from a micro to a macro level and for campaigners to strategically and authentically participate in online conversations already in progress. It created, through a set of tools and processes, capacity for paying attention at scale that was not previously possible.

In an interview with me for this research Weidinger, now a Future for Good Fellow at the Institute for the Future, explained Upwell’s approach that was grounded in both offline community engagement (meeting the ocean conservation digital managers where they are) and online community management (sourcing rich conversation metrics in unlikely places through listening to social conversations about the ocean).

Photograph of Rachel Weidinger. To learn more about her work go to www.rachelweidinger.com/about
Image of Rachel Weidinger – https://www.rachelweidinger.com/about

Collectively the practices that powered Upwell was in service to answering the question:

Can we use the momentum of focused attention to raise an issue above the noise?

Creating a Values-Based Listening Infrastructure

“I think because whatever story we’re telling about an issue, if that’s voting rates or ocean acidification, it has a lot of facets. It has a lot of variability across communities. It has usually narrative about issues and are very deeply tied into cultural perspectives. So you will see different cultural perspectives reflecting different understandings of social ramifications of what impacts them in their community.”

There is a critical role for media funders to use their position as a collaborative convener to leverage insights pulled from big listening practices and support collectives of newsrooms or groups of journalists in building listening infrastructure aligned with the intention to support shared resource collaboration across newsrooms covering serve diverse communities.

“It is possible to have very targeted niche conversation, but because it’s a very laborious research method and because they’re going to turn up so much value in that research method, you might as well have a bigger lens. So, I think coalitions of collaboratives that will get an issue for multiple perspectives are able to take full advantage of what comes out of it. I think working with funders before because they can take the confirmation, learn from it, change their funding pattern potentially, and offer share that with their grantee networks and the larger networks they’re a part of. That’s when I think this information is valuable. You can create a weather report and you can have a weather report for an entire country and keep it to yourself if you want to. But that feels like a spectacularly inefficient approach to me because if there are really high value assets and if you’re only using it to reshape your own incoming patterns, you’re not getting anywhere near the value you could get out of that investment.”

Weidinger explained the three building blocks to Upwell’s listening infrastructure:

1. The System, monitoring and analyzing online conversations

“Designing a system that supported the ability to pay attention to the large conversation in a deeper way more than anyone else working in the field. That depended on building trust over time, following conversations, trending keywords and Radian6 type of practices that we developed for understanding the conversation at a large scale over time and being able to look at the historic conversation and also people within over time.”

2. The Network/Community Management, leading data-driven attention campaigns

“For big listening to go deep, you have to build the network for the very beginning. It involved face-to-face meetings with influencers and leaders and senior management and all of the big blue and green organizations with scientists and government officials. We are only able to do that because Upwell was initially fiscally sponsored under the umbrella of Ocean Conservancy before spinning out independently which is one of the two large ocean conservation and organization that at that time was 40 years old and had a great reputation with lots of people so we were able to leverage their network in addition to building a network on our own.”

3. The Tide Report newsletter, sharing knowledge with the sector

“Our goal with the newsletter was to recount. We wanted to have the hottest ocean news of the day so that if nothing else it could standalone with a — ‘This is your professional news roundup for today’ utility. This gave us the eyeopener that we wanted and it made it easier to get people on our list and it meant that people would trust their colleagues and their peers, other organizations and conversations we were amplifying.”

The second piece of the newsletter was to get as close to one click sharing as possible. This probably feels like less revolutionary today, but it felt like a crazy project that we started doing in 2012… because people are super busy and we knew that most of the network of influencers and social media managers we were working with were going to give that email, if we were lucky, 30 seconds. If they saw something cool that they think would benefit their personal brand or their organization’s brand, that felt like were vital and important to them then they are going to share it. All of this was in service to building trust by regularly illustrating our commitment to listening back to our community.”

After Upwell: Open Sourcing Infrastructure

The tools and systems Upwell used is commonplace in digital newsrooms but formalizing the infrastructure: the intentionality, values-based metrics and sharing methodologies has led to Upwell continuing to deliver value long after it has shuttered. Ultimately the lesson in Upwell is a lesson in impermanence, that while we design for the long game, things that go up must come down and yet there is still immense knowledge to be gained in studying the heart that went into the scaffolding.

Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.

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Beyond the statement: How journalism funders can act in solidarity with marginalized communities

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July 23, 2020

“We stand in solidarity with Black communities. Black Lives Matter.”

Organizations, businesses, and groups across the United States sent this statement to millions of people via social media feeds and e-mail lists in early June 2020, in the wake of widespread protests for racial justice. Stating solidarity, however, doesn’t amount to much on its own.

Solidarity is a commitment to social justice that translates into collective action. This means statements need to be understood as distinct from statements attached to action. In the absence of action, declaring solidarity becomes a platitude for public relations. Talking the talk without walking the walk isn’t solidarity — it’s branding.

Funders can do more to support actions aligned with genuine solidarity in journalism.

What solidarity in journalism looks like

To assess news organizations using solidarity criteria, look at their coverage of marginalized communities. Are members of marginalized communities quoted? If so, are they quoted for their perspectives and thoughts, or solely for their feelings? Relegating marginalized people to speaking exclusively from the realm of emotion falls short of solidarity and may reinforce narratives of helpless victims who need saviors.

The Solidarity Journalism Initiative, which I lead at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, offers free training and resources to help journalists, editors, and journalism educators serve communities better by using techniques such as:

1) Ensuring that reporters always include those affected and subjected by issues, aligned with the ethos of “nothing about us without us.”

2) Placing community perspectives in dialogue with official perspectives to press for accuracy and to debunk false narratives that officials may prefer to advance.

3) Treating journalistic reporting as an endeavor to represent people’s lived experiences, rather than relying on official statements from authorities. Claims that ignore or attempt to invalidate people’s lived experiences — even if they come from officials — can therefore no longer be lionized as true.

Let’s be clear. Enacting solidarity in journalism does not mean:

1) Ignoring or expelling people in positions of institutional power from coverage.

2) Acting as an uncritical mouthpiece for social movements or nonprofits.

3) Replacing news reporting with opinion pieces.

My research on the role of solidarity in US journalism traces journalists’ motives for covering marginalized communities, and consistently finds that journalists understand their work as an opportunity to help people who live within dehumanizing structural conditions. Far from trumpeting neutrality or objectivity, journalists who cover marginalized communities tend to describe their work in terms of a moral obligation that compels them to focus on enduring social issues.

Industry leaders, on the other hand, display greater hesitation when faced with the prospect of acknowledging journalism’s longstanding role of solidarity. Ironically, unlike corporations that may do little to nothing aligned with solidarity and yet are quick to capitalize on the opportunity to issue a statement du jour, some prefer to position journalism’s role as reporting on acts of solidarity rather than admitting to enacting it as well.

The point of journalism in this country — and the main reason to preserve and protect it — is to serve the public interest, aligned with the country’s ideal of dignity for all.

How journalism funders can help

Journalism funders can help by supporting organizations who practice solidarity techniques. To use solidarity techniques, journalists need (1) time, (2) training, and (3) encouragement from editors to enter communities they may be unfamiliar with in order to build relationships and expand their sourcing networks.

This is where journalism funders can step up. With intensified public discourse around racial justice, funders can play a critical role through their investments in journalism using a solidarity framework.

A few examples of news organizations that are already enacting solidarity in journalism through sourcing and local representation include: The OaklandsideBroke in PhillyPittsburgh Media Partnership, and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. In each case, the organization or partnership reports the perspectives of people whose lived experiences are at stake in the story — who are often otherwise overlooked or sidelined in corporately-controlled local and national media outlets.

Who do you serve?

Across the country and world, thousands of protestors have continued to march to demand change. When police officers approach, many protestors begin to chant:

Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

Journalists, journalism funders, and journalism educators all need to ask ourselves these questions as well. And if we find ourselves dismayed or pained to realize our roles in upholding unjust systems, then let this be the moment when we move forward — together — to enact solidarity with communities who have been marginalized for far too long.

Anita Varma, PhD is the assistant director of Journalism & Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, where she leads the Solidarity Journalism initiative to help journalists implement solidarity in their reporting on marginalized communities. If you are a funder or journalist and would like to learn more about Solidarity Journalism, please contact avarma2@scu.edu. You can also follow her on Twitter.

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Invest in Possibility Builders: Support Adaptive Leaders in Newsrooms

Sabrina Hersi Issa
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July 24, 2019

“Recognizing the challenges of leadership, along with the pains of change, shouldn’t diminish anyone’s eagerness to reap the rewards of creating value and meaning in other people’s lives.”
— Ronald Heifetz, Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School

‘What is the future of news?’ is an evergreen question in journalism. Over the course of conducting this research, I continuously encountered the leadership and labor of individuals in journalism who did not wait for someone else to answer that question for them in order to execute necessary critical work to create the future of news we all deserve.

They are individual leaders inside and outside newsrooms who identified problems and took the initiative to become apart of solutions building and possibility remodeling. They started online communities for diverse journalistsbuilt robust and dynamic databases featuring diverse talent, spent nights and weekends training emerging talents in their specialities, they invested substantial labor to support the future of journalism so that diverse talents do not abandon the field because of structural and systemic inequalities.

These solutions builders understand the nature of newsroom systems and practice adaptive leadership, a “… leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments. It is being able, both individually and collectively, to take on the gradual but meaningful process of change. It is about diagnosing the essential from the expendable and bringing about a real challenge to the status quo.” Developing adaptive leadership is a model that is philanthropy supports in other sectors such as in educationhealthcare and technology.

Often for media funders, support for initiatives intended to improve diversity in journalism are delivered to programs with explicit focus, such as skills training, leaving gaps of support for initiatives to address the implicit systems that undermine newsroom efforts to recruit, retain and promote diverse journalists; bias, discrimination, managers ill-equipped to support diverse direct reports, targeted harassment, pay inequity, burnout, and advocating for oneself, to name a few.

In newsrooms, adaptive leaders steward progress through complex systems. The adaptive leaders interviewed for this research who witnessed or experienced systemic failures went to work to fill this gap in order to improve the field, often did so without institutional support and in addition to current workload, creating a double burden and accelerating rates of burnout.

Tara Pixley was a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow and is one of the founding members of Reclaim, a project alliance of five organizations dedicated to “amplifying the voices of underrepresented photographers and decolonizing the photojournalism industry.”

“I believe deeply in journalism as a tool for democracy and as an imperative in our everyday lives and with that respect and that love and that passion for journalism in general, and photojournalism specifically, I want to make it better,” she said in a New York Times piece announcing the project. A PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, Pixley is approaching designing solutions with the expertise of a trained social scientist: she is collecting the missing datasets and has an open survey for photojournalists, a design approach supported in an earlier piece of reported research for media funders seeking to support diverse journalism ecosystems. There is an opportunity for media funders to support adaptive leadership initiatives from diverse journalists building solutions and practicing a form of industry intrapreneurship that should be cultivated and invested in.

Rachel Wedinger shared with me in an interview for this research:

“It’s important to support individuals who have a very high level of comfort with complexity because we are going to act in values-based way within a complex system. I don’t really see the point of understanding a complex system if you continue from the other side of that understanding to act in the same kind of simplistic ways. Come to understand the landscape, come to understand the complex system that you’re trying to make change in and then make sure that your approach is taking into account that complexity in a real way.”

Project Alloy is another case for adaptive solutions-building from leaders within a different complex system struggling with diversity: the technology sector. Three leaders, Starr SimpsonIan Smith and Brooke Jarrett, created the nonprofit to provide grants to underrepresented individuals in the industry to attend technical conferences otherwise financially inaccessible to them.

Simpson explains the impetus behind Project Alloy at GraceNotes, a convening created by another adaptive leader Tess Rinearson.

“When we give grants through Project Alloy, we give directly to people for whom we wish to open doors of opportunity. This approach is change we believe in, and also change within reach — we, as individuals who work in the tech industry, are capable of making this kind of difference for others. So we decided to form a nonprofit to centralize and scale the process so we could reach even more people.”

A screenshot from the Project Ally website describing their mission.
Image from Project Alloy

For media funders, there is opportunity to create agile grants that will support efforts from adaptive leaders like Pixby, Simpson and Rinearson. Their leadership is not only filling critical structural gaps within their respective sectors but also cultivates talent from underrepresented backgrounds to create a community of people who will ultimately support one another down the line and over the arc of their careers. Yet these efforts are unfunded, underfunded or side projects added to already demanding workloads.

Simpson explains the level of volunteer labor in her GraceNotes talk:
“All three of us are volunteers. We have accomplished what we have so far by meeting every single week for over a year and a half for an hour in our free time,”

There is room to invest in those stewarding inclusion in their fields and there is a substantial need to invest in individual leaders who have entrepreneurial tendencies for solutions building.

Carmen Medina is the former Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director of Intelligence. She is a 32-year veteran of the intelligence community and also the author of Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within.

Illustrated list of 9 things rebels want from their boss
Image from Rebels at Work

I reached out to Medina for an interview on this subject as I knew her reputation as the driving force behind major organizational shifts and internal innovation within an institution known for a deeply entrenched resistance to change: the CIA.

Medina’s analysis of change and development balances leadership needs that are both macro and micro in nature, she explains the importance for an individual to understand the system they operate in and invest in making those systems better but also recognizes the need for the organization to invest in the growth of individual employees.

As a change agent and leader of color, Medina recalls, “I wish I had had mentors. I wish that there had been people before me who had been Latina and female who could have said, ‘Watch for this. Don’t watch for that. Don’t do this, do that.’ So, I think the lack of a mentor was a real problem. I wish I had really understood better how people saw me or heard me.” But, as Medina goes on to explain, she was not completely lacking for mentors, “I did have mentors but they were white males, great people. I don’t think that they ever felt that they could have had a conversation with me to say, ‘Tone that down’ because for them, of course, it’s a hazardous conversation to have. I was completely sympathetic to where they were coming from.”

In this context, there was not an explicit need for mentorship but rather an implicit need for support from another woman of color within the ranks. For funders seeking to support diverse ecosystems, adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds often have unique experiences, workplace vulnerabilities and needs that tie back to inequitable structures within organizations. To solve for that, we must name and address that the systems these leaders operate in, that are already inherently unbalanced and drive resources for corrective adjustments.

Emily May, Executive Director of Hollaback an organization dedicated to ending harassment, spoke to me about the experience designing solutions with journalists of color targeted for online harassment. “Women and people of color across the board were more severely impacted because it was worse and it came loaded with an entire lifetime of harassment and discrimination that this sat on top of it of these attacks.” May’s organization, nationally known for its bystander intervention programs, created a program to support newsrooms and media companies in addressing online harassment of journalists from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds experience at alarming rates. In this case there is an explicit urgency to address this implicit need, as harassment campaigns targeting journalists from vulnerable and underrepresented communities are actively creating unsafe work conditions and driving talent from the field. May shared that in surveying journalists in Hollaback’s trainings, “most people reported that they had no idea how bad online harassment was going to be and that it made them consider leaving journalism.”

It is difficult to surface to higher and higher levels of leadership when your mere presence, as a person from an underrepresented background, creates a hypervisibility. Medina speaks to her experience navigating those dynamics as a senior-level official within the CIA:

“Often times when you’re a minority in an organization, you come across as a rebel or a dissident even if that is never your intent. That was a big learning for me that, by definition, people would see me as disruptive of the status quo just by my heritage. I didn’t even have to speak up. Then when you do speak up, you will actually have a greater chance of seeing things differently from the prevailing norms. However distant you are from the prevailing norms, that’s how greater your likelihood is of being disruptive in what you say.”

For adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds, visibility is a double-edged sword: there is both a power and a vulnerability to being seen. It is incumbent upon newsrooms and funders supporting news organizations to name these structural barriers and invest in systems that mitigate its negative impact so that diverse talent at all levels of newsrooms can thrive.

Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.

Toolkit

New Tools for Funders: Supporting DEI in Journalism

By Angelica Das, Democracy Fund, and Katie Donnelly and Michelle Polyak, Dot Connector Studio
/
October 24, 2019

As part of Democracy Fund’s efforts to address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in journalism, Dot Connector Studio has developed two tools — the Journalism DEI Tracker and the Journalism DEI Wheel — to help funders and journalists understand the complete landscape of the field, including resources and strategies for advancing DEI within journalism.

Our recent report, Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Journalism: What Funders Can Do, revealed that DEI within journalism is an under-funded area, and recommended that funders share more resources on this topic across a diverse pool of grantees. These two tools are designed to help funders do just that. The Journalism DEI Tracker catalogs information and resources on DEI in journalism, and the Journalism DEI Wheel allows funders and stakeholders to focus on particular solutions for advancing DEI within journalism by demonstrating the range of strategies and focus areas to consider.

To put it simply, the Journalism DEI Tracker tracks the who and the what of the field; the Journalism DEI Wheel captures the how.

1. The Journalism DEI Tracker

A screenshot of the DEI Tracker

The Journalism DEI Tracker includes:

  • Professional organizations that support women journalists and journalists of color
  • News outlets and projects led by and serving women journalists and journalists of color
  • Professional development and training opportunities for women journalists and journalists of color (grants, scholarships, fellowships, and leadership training)
  • Academic institutions with journalism and communications programs to include in recruitment efforts to ensure a more diverse pipeline (Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges)
  • Resources for journalism organizations to promote respectful and inclusive coverage (industry reports, diversity style guides, curricula, and toolkits)

2. The Journalism DEI Wheel

Each area is divided into smaller points of intervention. For example, if you click on “Education/Training,” you will see opportunities to advance DEI in journalism through high school programs, college programs, scholarships, internships, fellowships, mid-career programs, and executive training. Click on any one of these to learn more and find specific examples, including lists of relevant initiatives on the Journalism DEI Tracker.

A screenshot of the Journalism DEI Wheel

The Journalism DEI Wheel demonstrates that there are many areas for addressing DEI in journalism. A funder may be focused on one aspect — say, improving news coverage — but not considering other aspects that may be related, such as improving newsroom culture. Of course, no single funder can — or should! — address every possible point of intervention, but viewing the range of possibilities can help illuminate gaps in current portfolios and identify new opportunities.

Not all areas are equally resourced. For example, there is a dearth of publicly-available resources available for journalism organizations when it comes to DEI in hiring, leadership, and general organizational culture. This is particularly disconcerting when we know that there are well-documented leadership gaps in the broader nonprofit field for people of color, women, and LGBTQ individuals. There is a clear need for leaders of DEI-focused journalism organizations to have up-to-date information on not just legal requirements, but also best practices in hiring, evaluation, and promotion. And, as our recent report shows, there is a clear need for funders to support such efforts.

We hope you will use these tools to inform your work, spark conversations among colleagues, and continue to promote this critically important work. We welcome your feedback: let us know how the tools are working for you, and how we can continue to improve them.

Blog

How Local Election Officials Prepared to Serve Voters During the Pandemic

Paul Gronke, Paul Manson, Jay Lee, and Heather Creek
/
May 11, 2021

Part of “Stewards of Democracy,” a series on findings from the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials

The 2020 election year was historic on many fronts. A decades-long deepening of political, social, economic, and cultural divides made for a tremendously volatile and competitive electoral landscape. What’s more, as a global pandemic took hold, many wondered how it would be possible to hold free and fair elections amid such a public health crisis.

As part of our 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials (conducted in summer 2020), we asked local election officials an extensive battery of questions about how they were preparing for the upcoming November election, including a special set of questions tailored to COVID-19 challenges.

The Realities of Different Jurisdiction Sizes

In each blog post in this series, we have pointed to the significance of jurisdiction size when describing and understanding the local election environment and the role of the local administrator.

Election readiness is no different and, accordingly, pandemic-related issues didn’t impact all local election officials in the same way — even if they were serving in the same state. Some large jurisdictions received a lot of media attention in 2020 because they had so many polling places and long voter lines. But small jurisdictions faced many of their own challenges as they worked to rapidly respond to shifting requirements and implement new procedures.

The fundamental distinction relates to workload, support, and staff. Local election officials in the smallest jurisdictions are more likely to wear several hats as town clerks, county recorders, or other roles. Elections work amounts to a small proportion of the job responsibilities for about half of small-jurisdiction officials, and as a result, these officials had even less working time to adjust to the realities of running elections amid a pandemic.

Chart showing that local election officials in smaller jurisdictions have more tasks than just elections

Additionally, small jurisdictions are much more likely to have a very small staff: About 75 percent of local election officials in jurisdictions that have under 5,000 voters are the sole individual administering elections in their jurisdiction, and many of these are only part-time workers.

Preparing to serve a few hundred voters is obviously a very different enterprise than doing so for millions of voters. Nonetheless, we flag for the reader that the ability to adapt to the new demands placed on local election officials in 2020 may have been crucially dependent on size, staff, and other resources. Simply having a larger election office allowed for some redundancy and support during the pandemic. We heard from a number of local election officials in small jurisdictions that a single positive COVID-19 test would require them to close their offices for 14 days because their small teams all work in close proximity. An official working in a larger jurisdiction would be able to rotate staff or lean on other parts of the organization to avoid such an impact.

Election Preparedness and COVID-19

Small jurisdictions were the least likely to say that they had to adjust their election planning in light of COVID-19. While all of our respondents in jurisdictions with more than 100,000 registered voters said that they had to adjust to the pandemic, only about 85 percent of local election officials in jurisdictions with under 25,000 registered voters said the same. We suspect these differences may be simply a function of scale — adjusting for things like socially-distanced voting is probably easier in rural settings and small municipalities.

Chart showing local election officials in smaller jurisdictions were least likely to say they had to adjust election planning due to COVID-19.

One of the specific changes that we were interested in was whether local election officials would have to consolidate polling places, leaving some voters farther away from a voting location than normal. Consolidation of polling places became a flashpoint for political and legal conflict during primary elections in the spring and summer.

By mid-summer when our survey was being conducted, only about 10 percent of local election officials were considering precinct consolidation during the November election in response to COVID-19, although for larger jurisdictions this proportion reached about 30 percent. Larger jurisdictions are more likely to have many polling places, while some smaller jurisdictions might have only a single voting location that cannot be shuttered.

Chart showing anticipated consolidation of polling places due to COVID-19 was low on average, mostly driven by larger districts.

When asked why they were considering consolidating some polling locations, a clear majority of respondents cited facilities constraints as part of their reasoning, and slightly under half cited poll worker issues. Resource and staffing constraints were much less common, and very few respondents said that they were required by the state to consolidate locations.

Chart showing facilities and poll worker constraints were most common reasons for polling place consolidation.

When asked about their preparations for conducting the election amid the pandemic, local election officials expressed a fairly high degree of confidence across a number of dimensions, such as having enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for their staff and volunteers, safely accommodating staff and volunteers in the workplace, and being able to utilize their permanent workforce and traditional polling places.

Chart showing local officials largely expressed confidence in their preparations for conducting the election amid COVID-19.

Presented with a set of questions asked in previous years to understand staffing and resources, local election officials expressed high levels of confidence in their ability to obtain accessible voting machines and polling places but much less confidence in obtaining poll workers, particularly bilingual poll workers. Note that our figure below shows confidence levels only for respondents who agreed that a given resource applied to them. While 95 percent of our survey participants responded that the first three resources applied to them, only 40 percent said having bilingual poll workers did, which corresponds with the proportion of those federally required to have such support. Thus, the lack of poll workers with bilingual skills is likely to be even more acute than our data reflect.

Chart showing local election officials were least confident about having sufficient poll workers — especially bilingual ones — for Election 2020.

Where Local Election Officials Found Support in Responding to the Pandemic

With so many local election officials reporting that they had to change their processes in response to COVID-19, we wanted to know what sources they turned to for information and which were most helpful.

Officials were most likely to seek resources close to home: in their local jurisdiction or to state elections offices, state associations, and/or state health authorities. About 35 percent of respondents consulted information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) directly, and other federal and national groups were referenced less frequently. Some state election directors and state associations may have used resources from federal and non-governmental organizations to inform their recommendations.

Chart showing local election officials were most likely to consult local or state resources to inform their pandemic response.

Information from state elections offices and professional organizations was also deemed to be the most helpful, compared to most of the other sources (all of which received similar ratings). Local election officials participating in our survey also had the option to write in a resource they consulted if not reflected in our list. We were not surprised to learn that those who chose to do this also rated their write-in resources very highly overall. These other resources included local emergency management departments, regional election official groups, the United States Postal Service, and local and national news sources.

Chart showing local election officials were most likely to find local or state resources helpful to their pandemic response.

Managing a Surge in Absentee Voting and Voting by Mail

One of the biggest effects of the pandemic on voting was a large increase in voting by mail. States came into the November 2020 election with varying levels of experience conducting elections by mail. At that point, five states conducted all elections by mail, and five states allowed any voter to sign up for permanent absentee voting and automatically receive a mail ballot for each election. In the November 2016 election, about 20 percent of the public voted by mail, but this varied from less than 5 percent in states that required an approved excuse to vote by mail to more than 87 percent in states that conduct all elections by mail.

Responses to a series of questions about mail voting preparation indicate that the majority of administrators felt prepared to run an expanded vote-by-mail system in November 2020. As expected, this varied based on the state’s prior experience with widespread mail voting. Most officials felt confident that they could obtain enough ballots and envelopes to meet expanded demand for mail voting; those in states with less vote-by-mail experience were about 15 percentage points less likely to feel confident than those in experienced states.

Other measures of mail voting preparation showed a wider spread between more experienced and less experienced states. Close to 95 percent of officials in states with more mail voting experience were confident that they had sufficient staff and resources to process increased numbers of mail ballots; fewer than 65 percent of officials in states with less experience shared that confidence. Similarly, officials in states with mail voting experience expressed higher confidence than other states — by more than 25 percentage points — that their state’s timeline was sufficient for all of the steps involved in requesting, mailing, returning, and processing mail ballots. The gap between more and less experienced mail voting states was much smaller on the issue of whether voters were sufficiently informed about the standard U.S. Postal Service delivery times that would impact whether a ballot arrived in time to meet state deadlines and be counted.

Overall, local election officials felt relatively confident about their process heading into November 2020. Over 90 percent said they would be fully prepared to administer a safe, secure, and accessible election. As we have seen in other results, election officials are less positive in their assessment of things outside of their control. For example, one in five raised concerns about whether they would have adequate funding for their jurisdiction or whether the other offices in the state would be sufficiently prepared for November, and under half said that offices across the country would be prepared to run a safe, secure, and accessible election.

Chart showing local election officials generally expressed confidence in their readiness for Election 2020.

Stewards Rising to the Challenge

The 2020 election was historic and an outlier in many respects, but some of the changes and lessons it generated may endure. Some pain points reported by our respondents in that year — sufficient bilingual poll workers and insufficient resources and trained staff — may have been magnified in 2020 but have been evident in prior years of this research.

Moreover, local election officials accomplished something extraordinary in 2020. They engaged a variety of resources, and through rapid learning and adaptation early in the pandemic, took a range of steps to protect voters and workers during a public health crisis. They prepared for more Americans than ever to vote by mail, even in states less experienced with the practice. And generally, they felt well prepared to deliver democracy, even under these conditions. In rising to the challenges of 2020, election officials revealed not only their competence, dedication, and grit, but also possibilities and potential for further strengthening our election system.

Blog

How Local Election Officials Trained for the Job, Ensured Cybersecurity, and Adapted to the Pandemic

Paul Gronke, Paul Manson, Jay Lee, and Heather Creek
/
May 4, 2021

Part of “Stewards of Democracy,” a series on findings from the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials

Effective election administration requires keeping up to date with a complex and dynamic set of policies and practices. A new local election official must be brought up to speed quickly, and as the chief official in charge of local elections, must gain a deep understanding of laws, statutes, and administrative procedures at the local, state, and federal levels.

Increasingly, local election officials also must be experts in many fields: human resources, information technology, direct mail processing, public relations, cybersecurity… the list goes on and on. And in 2020 there was a completely new skill to learn — how to conduct an election during a pandemic.

“We were one of the first counties to post election results on the internet. That took some doing… [then] I’m having to become a social media expert… Now, I’m a cybersecurity expert. Right now, I’m a public health expert, because I’m having to… figure out how to deploy all these protocols on how to conduct voting in person under a pandemic.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

The challenge is heightened for some elections offices, where small or part-time staffs have few with whom to share in this journey or consult with on questions. In our 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials, over half of respondents said they work in an office with just one or two staff members who may not even be full-time. Some work alone with only volunteer and/or temporary support, and with varying levels of expertise and support available from other local departments or from the state.

These realities underscore the importance of initial and ongoing education, as well as a connection to other professionals doing this work — all key ways local officials prepare to do their jobs effectively and respond to a continually changing elections landscape.

Job Training for Local Election Officials

The good news is that, overall, local election officials do report receiving initial and ongoing training — and they believe this training is effective. The officials we surveyed are relatively satisfied with the current level of job training that they receive, which is not insubstantial. Nationwide, about 85 percent of them received initial training when they first began their work, and almost 95 percent receive ongoing job training. Among local election officials receiving ongoing training, more than 90 percent go through the process at least once a year. Over 70 percent of local election officials believe that these trainings are either “extremely” or “very” effective, with ongoing training receiving higher ratings than initial training.

Chart showing that most local election officials report receiving training, but effectiveness varies

We also asked about training during in-depth interviews with local election officials. In these conversations, some officials said that initial training was overly general and not focused enough on the actual tasks that needed to be performed. Others shared that when they were first hired, a host of pressing needs took priority, in conflict with participation in training.

“But, of course, there wasn’t any time for training when I was sworn in on the early part of May and June. We’re having an election. So that is reality… you kind of had to learn by… as the saying goes… ‘Baptism by fire.’ We just kind of jumped in and just did it.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

By comparison, ongoing training is often tied to state and national association meetings or statewide training sessions, allowing for local election officials to interact with each other and learn from shared experiences.  We also heard in our in-depth interviews that formal and informal communications networks are vital avenues for learning and innovation. We suspect that linking ongoing training to venues that support collegiality and network-building not only enhances the effectiveness of the training, but also contributes to the positive evaluations local election officials give training.

“There’s a lot of training required for election officials and the state will host regional training sessions, and so we’ll end up seeing a lot of the familiar faces… there’s definitely a lot of interaction and sharing of ideas with how to do it the best way. And just the willingness to share that information and help the other clerks.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

We also learned that local election officials from the largest jurisdictions were the least likely to receive initial or ongoing training. Those from large jurisdictions were least likely to find trainings effective compared to their counterparts in smaller jurisdictions.

There could be any number of reasons for this, but one possibility is that local election officials in larger jurisdictions are more likely to come from other staff positions and would have had on-the-job training. This may lead them to feel underserved by additional training — a sentiment expressed by at least one interview participant.

“[The training] was not geared to me as somebody who had worked in the business for 20 years, but if I didn’t know anything, I’m not sure I would have come away terribly well prepared.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

Another explanation is that training programs are better suited to local election officials from the numerous small jurisdictions than the comparatively lower number of large jurisdictions. In our interviews, some local election officials from larger jurisdictions noted that training programs can have a “one size fits all” approach that they find less valuable. Many smaller jurisdictions include clerks who are being trained more broadly, rather than just on election administration, and such trainings might provide a greater utility in their day-to-day work as clerks. Election work as a percentage of the average local election official’s workload is highly variable and, in part, depends on the size of the jurisdiction. For jurisdictions with fewer than 25,000 registered voters, only 55 percent of local election officials report that elections constitute a majority or more of their workload. For jurisdictions with over 100,000 registered voters, 100 percent say elections constitute the majority of their workload.

“That group gets together at least three times a year. We get together for training. Again, some of it’s elections, but some of it’s the other stuff that we do such as budgeting, and some of us even have HR roles in our county, and some of them even have IT roles in our counties too…”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

Many local election officials go above and beyond requirements when enrolling in ongoing job training. While almost 70 percent of those who receive ongoing training said that their state mandates training of some sort, more than 40 percent voluntarily enroll in regular training, and almost 25 percent pursue certification beyond their state’s requirements.

While our survey did not explore the role local election officials play in developing training, our interviews did identify a number of these officials who have become trainers in their own work with state associations. These individuals shared a sense of pride and excitement about the role that more senior officials can play in helping colleagues across the state. We can imagine many ways that these trainers become an important part of the connective tissue for elections officials in a state, building community as they convey knowledge and expertise.

Bar chart showing that ongoing training is required for most local election officials, but many are motivated to attend for other reasons

Cybersecurity Preparation in Elections Offices

While the last year added many new worries for local election officials, cybersecurity has long been a key concern in the elections community — and it continues to grow in importance. For some local election officials, addressing cybersecurity needs poses challenges to attracting and retaining the right talent.

“[I]t’s very difficult to attract the talent that you need in the election industry and it’s becoming more complex. It used to be a very simple process, but now with the technology and cybersecurity that keeps me up at least every other night, that stuff’s not going away.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

We asked local election officials about a series of tasks they might be performing to increase cybersecurity for elections. In our 2018 survey, we asked election officials only if they had conducted these cybersecurity tasks, if they planned to, or if the tasks felt “not applicable to my situation.” That question produced high “not applicable” responses, and local election officials told us that some of these cybersecurity tasks were handled by other agencies at the local level or by the state. We included these options in our 2020 survey, the responses to which — as shown in the next figure — provide a far more accurate picture of what tasks are being completed, and at what level of government.

On the whole, local election officials stated that they had recently completed most cybersecurity tasks, or planned to do so in preparation for the November 2020 election. For eight of the nine tasks we asked about, over 45 percent of local election officials planned to complete them by the election.

Across the board, large jurisdictions are more likely to perform tasks associated with cybersecurity than smaller ones. On average, a local election official in a jurisdiction with over 250,000 registered voters planned to complete two more of the nine tasks than an official from a district serving fewer than 5,000 registered voters.

Stacked bar chart displaying the large proportions of local election officials that performed most of the tasks associated with cybersecurity

While some local jurisdictions show comparatively low rates for some tasks, it does not mean those tasks are not being completed. When we dig deeper into criminal background checks, for example, a quarter of respondents reported that “another local office handles background checks, and 16 percent reported that their state office handles them, while 32 percent responded that this task wasn’t applicable to them. The only tasks where “not applicable to my situation” exceeds 10 percent are “criminal background checks” (32 percent), “disabling wireless peripheral access” (18 percent), and “held cybersecurity training sessions for employees or elections workers” (19 percent).

Bar chart displaying that local election officials in smaller jurisdictions were less likely to report that they had completed plans to conduct background checks

The smallest jurisdictions were the most likely to answer not applicable” and the most likely to report that tasks are handled by another local office or by the state. Fifty-two percent of those serving over 250,000 registered voters had plans to conduct background checks in-house (which they had either already completed or planned to complete before the election). But only 23 percent of jurisdictions with under 5,000 voters had similar plans. These small jurisdictions were much more likely than the largest jurisdictions to say that background checks were handled at the state level (21 percent vs. 7 percent) or that such checks weren’t applicable in their situation (32 percent vs. 20 percent).

The survey offers insight and focus for efforts to improve cybersecurity practices. For example, over a quarter of respondents said that, in their case, multi-factor authentication and a cybersecurity communication plan were handled by the state elections office, not at the local level. Over 20 percent of respondents said that background checks, wireless access methods such as Bluetooth, and computer system audits are handled by other local offices.

When approaching reforms to increase multi-factor authentication, therefore, efforts should be directed at state election departments. Improvements in other areas of security might be best targeted at local governments as a whole rather than at election offices specifically.

Support Networks for Local Election Officials

With so many small offices, it’s not surprising that local election officials reach out to other organizations or individuals for professional or personal support. No office is an island — even for the nine cybersecurity tasks we asked about, three-quarters of local election officials reported that one or more of these tasks was handled by another local office or the state election office (including over half of jurisdictions with more than 250,000 registered voters).

Our survey demonstrates the importance of these support networks. Over 90 percent of local election officials agreed that they had received sufficient guidance from state and federal authorities regarding the security of their election systems. This rate of agreement held up regardless of size, but smaller jurisdictions were much more likely to “strongly” agree, whereas larger jurisdictions often only “somewhat” agreed with this statement.

Stacked bar chart displaying that local election officials feel well-guided on election security by state and federal authorities

Almost half of all respondents said they belonged to their state association of local election officials, and over a quarter reported belonging to a regional or local association of election officials, but only about a quarter of officials in the smallest jurisdictions reported joining these organizations.

Across the board, in fact, local election officials in smaller jurisdictions were less likely to belong to the organizations that we asked about. This difference is particularly noticeable on questions about membership in national and international organizations such as the Election Center and the International Association of Government Officials (iGO).

One caveat is that our survey may not be capturing all of the organizations that local election officials belong to. For example, clerks may participate in associations particular to their other township or municipal duties. While not specifically elections-focused, these associations may provide a connection to others facing similar elections challenges in their states.

“If it wasn’t for those national organizations and opportunities to network with others across the country, you wouldn’t have anybody to talk to. Because there’s nobody in the county organization that has a clue what we do over here.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

Figure showing that local election officials in larger jurisdictions are more likely to belong to a state, national, or international association

In the COVID-19 environment, local election officials had to rapidly implement changes in order to administer safe and accessible elections. We asked respondents which organizations were helpful in providing resources and information they could use to do their work amid the pandemic. Local and election-related resources were most likely to be consulted: Over half of local election officials said they used information from their state election office, state association of election officials, and their state or local health authority. About 35 percent reported using information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their planning, and under 20 percent reported using any of the other sources we asked about, which were mostly national-level election organizations.

Bar chart depicting that amid the pandemic, local election officials were most likely to consult a local or state resource for guidance

Larger-jurisdiction local election officials were slightly more likely to use each of these sources during the pandemic than officials in smaller jurisdictions. Those serving under 5,000 voters reported using between two and three sources on average (out of the nine we asked about, including “other resource”), while local election officials in the largest jurisdictions reported using between four and five sources on average.

Bar chart depicting local election officials in large jurisdictions consulted more sources for COVID-19 planning

Wide Participation and General Satisfaction — With Key Areas for Improvement

Local election official training and connection to others in the profession are important to ensuring that elections are fair, efficient, and secure. Our survey findings indicate that while there are areas for improvement in the initial training local election officials receive, and possibly a need to tailor trainings to better fit the realities of larger jurisdictions, training is generally meeting the local election community’s needs.

Professional associations and other organizations provide critical connections between officials that often find themselves performing unique duties within their governmental organization. While we find participation in these organizations to be high among the larger jurisdictions, there is room for improvement in helping smaller jurisdictions connect with regional, state, and national organizations and resources.

Finally, training and professional associations contribute to the formal and informal networks among officials, which are avenues for sharing expertise, responding to challenges, or simply swapping war stories with friends and colleagues. More research needs to be done to understand the value these informal connections add, and how they may be further fostered and supported in the elections community.

Blog

Perspectives on Election Policy and Practice from the Local Officials Who Make It Happen

Paul Gronke, Paul Manson, Jay Lee, and Heather Creek
/
April 27, 2021

Part of “Stewards of Democracy,” a series on findings from the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials

Through their role in administering elections and expertise developed over time, local election officials gain a vantage point on election-related matters that is like no other. They are often more knowledgeable about how election laws and procedures operate at the ground level than citizens, advocates, and politicians. They interpret and implement election policy as they conduct local, state, and federal elections. They interact regularly with voters, as well as public office holders and political candidates, and they shape the voting experience.

In this post, we examine responses to the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials to uncover this critical group’s views on the performance and integrity of the U.S. elections system and commonly proposed election reforms. We also unpack differences across jurisdiction size and other factors. Finally, we explore election officials’ opinions on their own role in serving voters. (See the survey website to learn more about data and methodology.)

Because of their expertise and connection to networks of other elections professionals, local election officials may be less swayed than the general public by some claims and counterclaims about elections. However, they are deeply embedded in local administration, and the distinct local and state administrative environments in which these officials work vary significantly in both nature and size, which may explain some differences in how they view election policies and reforms.

Local election officials are also diverse in their backgrounds, life experiences, and political beliefs (though much less so than the public at large, as we reported in a previous post), and this is also likely to lead to a diversity of viewpoints across the profession. Further, local election officials’ attitudes may be shaped by other forces, such as knowledge about election administration in other regions, continuing education and professional certification programs, or involvement in regional and national association meetings.

Our survey is among very few posed to chief local election officials that include questions about election policy reforms and system integrity, and interpreting the patterns that result is a complicated enterprise. In the following discussion, we explore differences in perspectives on these issues within the population of local election officials — specifically, by jurisdiction size, partisanship, and experience with specific election policies — understanding that ongoing research can reveal more about how such perspectives are shaped.

Confidence in the Election System

Voter confidence is a commonly referenced metric for the overall performance of the elections system. Voter confidence levels, especially when voters are asked whether they think their own ballot was counted accurately, often reflect individuals’ voting experiences and thus, at least in part, the administrative choices of local election officials. But voter confidence also moves in response to the election outcome, especially when survey participants (including local election officials) are asked about state and national election integrity, which may be driven more by political outcomes and less by legal or administrative choices.

Our study asked local election officials about their confidence in the integrity of the voter registration systems and the vote count at the state and national levels. We then compared these responses to those from the general public, captured in the Cooperative Election Study survey — but it should be noted that our survey of local election officials was administered in summer 2020 and the survey of the general public happened just before the election.

Not surprisingly, local election officials are much more confident than the public in the system that they help run. Although like the general public, local election officials also express more skepticism about election integrity at the national level than in their own state. Among local election officials, confidence that votes will be counted as intended at the state level is 96 percent — nearly 20 percentage points higher than among the general public — but their confidence in the national count is less than 10 percentage points higher than that of the public. When asked about voter registration rolls, local election officials similarly said their states’ systems were very secure, but they expressed much lower confidence in the security of voter registration systems nationwide.

Similarly, the percentage of local election officials who answered “don’t know” was much lower when asked about the integrity of state registration lists (4 percent) and state vote counts (1.4 percent) than national registration lists (16.7 percent) and the national vote count (12.9 percent). Also, as we explore later in this post, there is far less variation across jurisdiction size when asked at the state level than at the national level. These observations taken together lead us to surmise that local election officials’ opinions about state-level systems are grounded more in expertise and experience than are their opinions about systems nationwide.Local election officials are more confident in the election system than the general public, particularly within their state

Differences in Confidence by Jurisdiction Size

The size disparity across voting jurisdictions percolates throughout almost all aspects of local election administration, including perceptions of system integrity. For example, fully 95 percent of local election officials in the largest jurisdictions are “somewhat” or “very” confident in the integrity of the national vote count, as are 85 percent of local election officials from mid-sized jurisdictions serving 100,000–250,000 registered voters. Yet 62 percent of local election officials in the smallest jurisdictions express confidence, and just 14 percent in these districts are willing to say they are “very” confident.

Similarly, confidence in the integrity of nationwide voter registration lists declines steadily as we move from the largest jurisdictions (where nearly eight in ten are confident) to the smallest jurisdictions (where less than half are confident).

A look at local election officials’ confidence in the state vote count and registration lists reveals a dramatically different pattern — confidence is extremely high, and there is no variation at all across jurisdictions.

The smallest jurisdictions are overwhelmingly municipalities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and New England. The largest jurisdictions contain the most populous cities and metropolitan areas of the country. Further research is needed to understand whether differences in perceptions about the national election system are purely a function of size or something else, such as exposure to and involvement with national professional organizations, which is more common among local election officials in more populous jurisdictions.

Local election officials serving larger jurisdictions are more confident in the integrity of the election nationwide

Differences in Confidence by Partisanship

Partisanship has become the most important factor in explaining political values and opinions in the mass public, overshadowing the influence of race, education, religion, and other differences. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that partisanship factors into perceptions about election administration. In fact, the partisan gap in state voter confidence is larger among local election officials than within the mass public, while the partisan gap on national voter confidence is approximately the same magnitude across these groups.

Local election officials show partisan differences in their confidence in elections similar to those in the general public

Perspectives on Election Reforms

We want to amplify the voices of local election officials in policy debates, so we asked these professionals to share their viewpoints about important and timely election reform proposals. This produces a gauge of national support among those who would need to put these changes into place. In 2020, we asked local election officials about seven election reform policies — for six of them, we are able to compare the responses of these officials to those of the general public to understand major areas of agreement and difference. The popularity of these proposals should be understood in the context of their familiarity to officials and the public. In 2020, voter identification was required in 36 states, and Election Day registration was allowed in 21 states plus Washington, D.C. Only five states conducted all elections by mail, and there was no national holiday on Election Day.

Among reform policies, requiring the use of photo identification stands out; it is supported most strongly by local election officials (77 percent) and by the public (68 percent), and it is an area of greatest agreement between these groups.

The only other suggested change that is supported by more than half of local election officials is consolidating local, state, and federal elections so that they would occur at the same time. Local election officials understand how much cost, administrative burden, and job stress is created by the near constancy of elections in some states and localities.

Local election officials differ from the public in their support for many voting reforms, with the exception of voter ID requirements

How about making Election Day a national holiday? Just over half the public say they support this, while just over 40 percent of local election officials expressed support for this change. Interestingly, somewhat fewer in the public (40 percent) would support moving Election Day to a weekend, and only 15 percent of local election officials endorse this move.

Voting by mail, which became a flash point for political conflict in the 2020 election, shows far more support (over 40 percent) among local election officials, a number that may seem surprisingly high until we consider that 46 percent of all ballots were cast by mail in 2020. While our survey of local election officials was conducted in summer 2020, it was evident even at that point that voting by mail would hit historic levels that year. Local election officials were 14 percentage points more likely to support a full vote-by-mail system than were members of the general public (public polling was conducted very near to the November 2020 election).

Election Day registration is supported by approximately 40 percent of local election officials and just under half of the public. Also online/internet voting is supported by only 15 percent of local election officials, only half of its support among the public. Local election officials’ concerns over online/internet voting likely reflects the generally held belief by experts that no system would allow secure and private internet voting with current technology.

Differences in Policy Support by Partisanship

Election officials show the same partisan divide on some voting reforms as we see within the general public. For example, local election officials who identify as Republicans are about 45 percentage points more likely to support photo identification requirements, and local election officials who identify as Democrats are about 25 percentage points more likely to support same-day registration, running all elections by mail, or making Election Day a holiday or weekend event.

It is revealing that the partisan policy gap among local election officials is approximately equal in magnitude to that within the public. This suggests that these two populations may be responding to similar messaging from national political leaders.

Other studies have found a muted partisan effect on policy views of local election officials and on how these officials assess the benefits of election day registration. As 28 percent of the local election officials in our survey told us “they prefer not to answer” our question on partisan leanings (194 of 707 who responded to this question), and another 12 percent self-identified as “Independent,” our analysis on this topic is limited to the responses of the remaining 60 percent in our sample who felt comfortable telling us their partisan leanings, so we caution against over-interpreting these results.

Partisan differences on election policies among local election officials largely mirror those in the general public

Differences in Policy Views by Experience

We have observed in the past that experience matters to the views of local election officials, as it does for most policymakers. Prior experience working with a particular election rule or policy can impact a local election official’s opinion about the wisdom of implementing the same policy nationwide.

In our study, we use state election laws as a proxy for experience or knowledge about a given policy. And, indeed, the impact of policy experience is evident in the data when we compare opinions among local election officials in states with and without Election Day registration, and election officials in the five states that have full voting by mail to those serving in the rest of the states. In both cases, experience with the policy translates into support levels that are 50 percentage points higher.

Local election officials who have experience with vote-by-mail and Election Day registration are more likely to support these policies

Local election officials’ opinions about photo identification requirements are also conditional on whether their state already has the policy in place. In our survey, those in states with photo identification standards (either strictly required or with alternative workarounds) expressed the highest support when asked generally about a photo identification requirement. Officials in states with non-photo identification requirements expressed somewhat lower levels of support. Support was lowest — below 50 percent — among local election officials who serve in states with no identification requirement. (All categories for identification requirements are taken from the National Conference of State Legislatures.)

Local election officials in states with photo ID requirements are more likely to support these policies

Finally, we refer to findings about online and automatic voter registration from our earlier Stewards of Democracy report published in 2018. We learned then that support for online voter registration and automatic voter registration was substantially higher among states that had already adopted those policies — more than twice as high in the case of automatic voter registration.

Dedication to Voters and Elections

As we engage with local election officials and work to understand their views, it’s helpful to also understand their level of commitment to voters and effective elections.

Based on their responses to this and previous surveys, local election officials express highly voter-centric ideals and responsibilities. Nearly 90 percent of them say that they “enjoy educating citizens about voting rules and procedures,” and roughly 70 percent agree that voter education, voter satisfaction, and encouraging voter turnout is part of their job. Meanwhile, 70 percent disagree that the primary responsibility of a local election official is to conduct the election and not to worry about voter education or satisfaction.

When we asked about support for this objective, we were not surprised to discover that almost two-thirds of local election officials face resource constraints that limit their ability to educate voters along with conducting elections.

“We also need to do our best to educate voters and get them engaged early so they can easily exercise their voting options. We are all in this together and if one of us fails, we all fail. So, we need to build each other up and understand our differences. No election is perfect. But we can all strive to be as efficient, secure, and fair as possible.”

– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL, MID-SIZED JURISDICTION

We also asked whether or not local election officials should work to reduce demographic disparities in turnout, a question we thought might surface some disagreement because many of the reasons for turnout differences are beyond the control of local officials. Nonetheless, just under half of our respondents did think that reducing demographic disparities was part of their mandate.Local election officials express voter-centric views about their role

The underlying structure of local election officials’ opinions is complex, impacted by jurisdiction size, partisanship, practical experience, and many factors not considered here. This is a ripe area for further research as we try to understand, support, and amplify local election officials’ viewpoints about election integrity and reform.

Blog

Understanding the Career Journeys of Today’s Local Election Officials and Anticipating Tomorrow’s Potential Shortage

Paul Gronke, Paul Manson, Jay Lee, and Heather Creek
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April 20, 2021

Part of “Stewards of Democracy,” a series on findings from the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials

A modern, trusted, and equitable U.S. election system depends not just on laws or administrative procedures, but on people who are pivotal to delivering democracy: local election officials. In this post we examine the career trajectories, job satisfaction rates, and retirement plans of those playing this important role. Our research found generally good news about the experience and satisfaction of this workforce. We also found a few points of concern — specifically the significant proportion of local election officials eligible for retirement before the next general election.

Findings are based on survey and interview responses from more than 850 individuals who serve as chief local election officials — those in charge of elections in their jurisdiction — across the country. Whenever interpreting information about local election administration and administrators, it is important to pay attention to differences by jurisdiction size. For our analysis, we often present data sorted in this way, and all means are weighted to represent the overall population of local election officials. See the Reed College Early Voting Information Center website for further survey results broken down by jurisdiction size.

Wide Variation in Scope and Staffing

The specific array of election officials’ responsibilities varies enormously across states and between jurisdictions of different sizes. In the largest jurisdictions, these professionals are full-time officials, compensated with six-figure salaries and running operations with hundreds or even thousands of permanent staff, and they administer elections to millions of eligible citizens.

At the other end of the spectrum, more than one-third of officials tell us that their jobs are less than full-time and that they are responsible for far more than just administering elections. Notably, over half of our respondents (and by implication, half of local election officials nationwide) told us that their “staff” consists of only one person — that is, themselves.

Three-quarters of jurisdictions serving fewer than 5,000 registered voters have only one staff member working in the elections office, and 25 percent of jurisdictions serving between 5,000 and 25,000 voters have only one elections staffer. In the largest jurisdictions, by contrast, almost 85 percent of elections offices have 10 or more staff members — and many have more than 50.

The difference in staffing between large and small jurisdictions is striking

Paths to Becoming a Local Election Official

The path to leadership as a local election official differs across and within states. It also differs by jurisdiction size as illustrated below. Whether officials are elected versus appointed is the most basic difference, but elected officials may also vary in whether they run for partisan versus non-partisan positions. Of note, research has shown that how officials are selected can be influential in shaping their incentives and policy goals.

While over half of local election officials are elected to their positions, less than 20 percent of these officials in the largest jurisdictions are elected. Among local election officials who are elected, 61 percent are elected in partisan elections, while the other 39 percent hold non-partisan positions. Our overall estimate of the percentage of local election officials who are elected versus appointed closely matches estimates obtained from surveys conducted by the Congressional Research Service.

Election official in larger jurisdictions are less likely to be elected to their positions

Among officials who are appointed, those appointments may be made by county commissioners, a chief executive, or by elections boards or commissions, which themselves can be elective or appointive. Finally, appointive positions may or may not have civil service protections.

The responses in our survey indicate that the community of local election officials is highly experienced. The median official has been working in elections for over 12 years, having started in 2008. Local election officials in larger jurisdictions have a slightly longer tenure than those in smaller jurisdictions. Less than 5 percent of survey respondents reported that they had been working in election administration less than a year, and just over 10 percent said they had been in their current position for a year or less.

Local election officials, especially those in larger districts, are highly experienced

While local election officials in larger jurisdictions reported slightly longer tenures, those from smaller jurisdictions reported that they were older. Seventy-six percent of local election officials in jurisdictions serving under 5,000 voters are over age 50, while 60 percent of those in jurisdictions serving over 250,000 voters are over that age. In combination with findings about tenure, this would seem to indicate that officials in larger jurisdictions are starting in the elections field earlier in life than those in smaller jurisdictions, thus gaining more job experience at a younger age. Based on available data, it seems likely that a significant number of local election officials working in larger jurisdictions served previously in smaller- or medium-sized jurisdictions in something of a career “pipeline.” We do know that large jurisdictions with appointed election officials often conduct national searches for replacements. What is less well known is the breadth and diversity of these search pools.

Local election officials in smaller jurisdictions tended to be older than their larger-jurisdiction counterparts

“I took a part-time job in our community — we’re in a small town — working with what is like our chamber of commerce. Did that for 10 years, being active with the community… that led to me eventually running for office here, trying to have a voice in the direction of our community.”
– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL, ELECTED POSITION

Local election officials in smaller jurisdictions are more than twice as likely as those in the largest jurisdictions to have no prior elections experience before starting their current job as the chief local election official.

The types of jobs and activities that current local election officials worked on before entering the elections field can also inform our understanding of the career pipeline. Our survey respondents were most likely (39 percent) to say that they were working in the private sector (non-elections related) before entering election administration. Another 21 percent said they had other roles in local government, and 13 percent were elected officials serving in roles other than election administration.

Working in the business sector is the most common prior experience of local election officials

“Before this, my experience varied from construction to working in law offices… I worked in the office under the previous clerk as a part-time employee, then bumped up to full-time employee while working another full-time job. The previous clerk passed away in office and another deputy finished the term and then I ran and won the election.”
– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

As we think about career pathways, we must realize that for many local election officials, there isn’t a dedicated “career track” to follow into this profession. Larger jurisdictions might train up their assistant elections director or actively pursue outside candidates to replace a retiring official, while in a smaller jurisdiction an outgoing election official might be replaced by a first-time elected clerk with no previous elections experience.

Job Satisfaction Among Local Election Officials

For all the diverse pathways and job responsibilities involved, there is remarkable agreement that being a local election official is a rewarding career. Among our respondents, 55 percent said that they were “satisfied” with their job, and another 37 percent said they were “very satisfied.” This holds true regardless of the jurisdiction size.

An important caveat for all of our findings on job satisfaction is that the survey was conducted prior to the November 2020 election, which saw death threats and other attacks directed at local election officials. We asked these questions during the summer of 2020, when dedicated officials may have felt determined to stay focused on the positive aspects of their work. Perspectives on satisfaction may have shifted by November.

“There’s something at the end of the day, knowing the most fundamental aspect of our country was carried out from president to school board. …We had a transition of power, and people had faith in the results, in the votes counted being valid.”
– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

Local election officials report high levels of satisfaction with their job across all jurisdiction sizes

Across most questions probing specific areas of job satisfaction, there was very little disparity between local election officials serving in jurisdictions of different sizes. When grouped by size of jurisdiction, all groups on average agreed with about eight or nine of the 14 statements indicating satisfaction.

When asked how they feel about specific facets of their job, respondents unsurprisingly presented more varied opinions.

“Election offices on the local level should have more support. We are expected to give a herculean effort without the proper resources in space, employees, and equipment. We sacrifice our own health in order to make sure everything goes smoothly.”
– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL, SMALLER JURISDICTION

Overall, approximately 50 percent of local election officials surveyed said that they were satisfied with their pay. Still, it’s important to understand that this high rate of pay satisfaction is uneven; when we isolate the responses of those from the largest jurisdictions, the figure jumps to 74 percent.

Local election officials in larger jurisdictions are more satisfied with pay, but report more challenges with work-life balance and leaving problems at work

When we further probe into the elements of local election officials’ job satisfaction we find a few concerns. For example, resources and funding are a pain point, with over half of local election officials agreeing with the statement, “a lack of sufficient funding prevents me from doing my job well.” Local election officials share issues about their personal work experience as well. For example, less than 45 percent said that their workload was “reasonable.” Managing work-life balance is also a problem. While overall, most local election officials share that they are able to balance work and home priorities, the larger the jurisdiction is, the more this is a reported challenge.

It is important to note that 25 percent of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with the question of balancing work and home priorities. To explore this further, we framed the question a different way. When asked if they agree with the statement, “I am able to leave problems at work,” local election officials surface more worries. Almost half of respondents said they agreed that they could leave problems at work, and 42 percent disagreed with the statement. In the responses to both of these questions, we see that for larger jurisdictions, balancing the stresses of work is harder.

“I’m exceeding my capacity for dealing with it. I’m tired, constantly. It’s stressful. I go home and crash, get up and do it again the next day. I think all election officials right now are kind of in that same boat. Presidential elections are always stressful but this one seems hyper stressful, at least to me personally.”
– LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL

Combining the pandemic with heightened political pressure, misinformation, and staffing concerns, the 2020 election created a uniquely stressful environment for local election officials. Some expressed this during interviews conducted in fall 2020.

Plans for Leaving the Field

Having an experienced body of local election officials is important to maintaining administrative competencies, knowledge of state laws and local procedures, as well as an intimate familiarity with the local electorate.

This local election official population is older, with many nearing retirement. Indeed, 74 percent of chief local election officials are over age 50, and a quarter are over age 65. Almost 35 percent report that they’re eligible to retire before the next presidential election in 2024, and this figure is more than 50 percent among local election officials in the largest jurisdictions. It should be noted that among those eligible to retire in the next four years, only 45 percent said that they planned on doing so. Even so, this expected wave of retirements diminishes today’s population of local election officials by 16 percent. When we asked those who were planning to retire to tell us their motivations for doing so, the top three reasons shared were a desire to move on to something else in their life (37 percent); that they had served long enough to retire (35 percent); and the political environment (23 percent). In addition, 20 percent noted they “no longer enjoy the position” or “want to do something else for work.”

Of the local election officials that are not eligible to retire soon, we asked whether they were planning to leave the field otherwise. Only 10 percent said yes, but a quarter responded that they were “unsure.” Similar to those planning for retirement, the most common reason they gave was a desire to move on to something else in their life (33 percent). But notably, job satisfaction concerns like the desire to move to a position with a better work-life balance (29 percent), desire to do something else for work (25 percent), and no longer enjoying the work (20 percent) were cited more often than, for example, the political environment, which factored more significantly into retirement decisions.

When we take into account those planning to retire and planning to leave for other reasons, the numbers give us pause. Overall, 22 percent of respondents said that they were planning on leaving the profession in the next four years, 49 percent said they weren’t planning on leaving, and 29 percent said they were unsure.

Most worrisome, local election officials in the largest jurisdictions were almost twice as likely to say that they’re planning to leave in the next four years. These officials have large and presumably experienced staff but very little is known about planned transitions in leadership. Local election official turnover in the largest jurisdictions has the potential to impact a huge number of American voters.

Significant proportions of chief local election officials plan to move on before the next general election, especially those in the largest jurisdictions

In survey follow-up interviews, local election officials were asked to discuss what transition-planning looks like in their jurisdiction. Few of them — whether elected or appointed — said they have formal transition plans or documented procedures in place for their eventual successors. Most said that they expect their second-in command (e.g., deputy clerk, assistant manager) to take over the role when they leave the position.

Paying Attention to the Pipeline

Given that more than half of all local election officials have served over a decade in their positions and express overall high levels of satisfaction with the job, there is much positive news about this field of professionals at the front lines of democracy. Still, traditional pain points — budgets, facilities, and compensation — remain, supporting assertions by many that the field is undervalued and under-resourced.

Further, with half of local election officials from the largest jurisdictions reporting that they are qualified for retirement, the shape and composition of the pipeline of talent to support this work is an important topic for future investigation. This means paying close attention to retirement and other turnover, as well as the degree to which these positions are filled by people who are diverse, experienced, and capable of playing this vital role.

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