Friday, May 19, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Election officials used to toil in relative obscurity. Poll workers put in long, intense hours around voting time, filling low-paid bureaucratic roles that were poorly understood by the public they served.
But since 2020, that world has turned upside down. Today, many election workers are the subject of harassment, threats and even acts of violence. Some have had to flee their homes or have been assaulted. One said it’s “like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
The sudden vitriol stems from the big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, which has metastasized in voting precincts nationwide. The result is as predictable as it is disturbing: all across the country, election workers are quitting in record numbers. In my own home state of Kentucky — hardly a battleground — about 20% of all county clerks opted to retire rather than run for reelection last year.
Which raises an urgent question for 2024: Who is going to be left to work the elections?
Consider the recent case of Lindsey Taylor. As reported by NBC News, after being hired as voting registrar in rural, deep-red Buckingham County, Va., she found herself at the center of an effort by local election deniers to oust her. She was harassed at meetings, accused of treason, and her bosses were pressured to fire her. In March, she resigned, along with all her staff.
In Tarrant County, Texas — home to Fort Worth and 2.1 million voters — Heider Garcia was known as “the gold standard” of election administrators, according to the Texas Tribune. Last month, he resigned in response to a sham “election integrity task force” imposed by a new county judge.
The list goes on: A Boston Globe review of six states — Arizona, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found a roughly 30% increase in turnover among election officials since 2020. This will only exacerbate an already critical manpower shortage at a time when trust in elections is historically low and declining.
Now think about the following hypothetical: It’s November of next year and voting is underway. Throughout the country, polling places are drastically understaffed due to waves of resignations. Many of those who are working are inexperienced. This leads to long lines at the polls and even longer waits for results as vote counting is conducted by skeleton crews working around the clock.
Last time — in an election widely considered to be the most secure in history — we saw rampant conspiracy theories and simmering violence that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. What might we expect in this even graver, more combustible scenario?
That’s why we must fix the problem, and do it now. The task of restoring Americans’ confidence in elections is too great for any single election administrator, agency or legislature to handle alone. It requires cooperation within and between governments at every level. The best way to safeguard against future crises is by building a broad-based, cross-partisan coalition of election defenders who are willing to stand up for the integrity of the vote.
One of the reasons American elections are so secure is because they’re decentralized, with states exercising wide latitude to administer their own procedures. We don’t have one voting system, we have 50. But this also makes it hard to organize a response to the big lie. Grassroots efforts to support election officials and educate the public, like the National Association of Secretaries of State’s #TrustedInfo network, are a good start. But more coalition-building and resource-sharing will be necessary heading into a 2024 election in which election lies are likely to play a major role.
A reform agenda should have two priorities: ensuring no votes are tampered with or cast fraudulently; and preserving access to the ballot for everyone who’s eligible. We should provide more funding at the state level to improve voting technology, much of which is hopelessly antiquated. And we should hire more election administration personnel to enable more timely reporting of results. Because nothing saps voter confidence like a months-long vote-counting odyssey.
Commonsense solutions like automated voter registration have proven effective at cutting costs and making voting systems more efficient in red and blue states alike. And doing so improves the accuracy of these states’ registration lists without purging voters — something that the “election integrity” crowd and the “voting rights” crowd can both celebrate.
Democrats should learn to accept that not all election security measures equal voter suppression, and Republicans should learn that voter access is good politics.
Or we can do nothing, let the partisan acrimony continue to boil, and hope the problem goes away on its own. In the meantime, we’ll lose another generation of Lindsey Taylors and Heider Garcias. The indispensable talent that makes up the unseen-but-essential backbone of American democracy will continue to slip away under a deluge of tribal acrimony.
If we don’t stand up for election workers, we’re going to be forced to reckon with a world without them. And that’s a nightmare for democracy. The choice is ours.
Trey Grayson serves as advisory board co-chair of the Secure Elections Project. He previously served as Kentucky’s secretary of state and chair of the Republican Association of Secretaries of State. He wrote this for Bloomberg Opinion.
