John,

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Our nation’s election infrastructure relies on dedicated public servants who work hard to ensure Americans are able to make their voices heard at the ballot box. Unfortunately, since 2020, these workers have become the targets of threats and harassment and it is causing many of them to leave the profession.

We’ve been sounding the alarm about this critical issue, but our new report makes it crystal clear why our calls for supporting these officials are so important.

Today, Issue One released a new report, “The High Cost of High Turnout,” which was first covered by NPR. This hard-hitting report shines a light on how high turnover rates among local election officials since November 2020 has diminished the level of institutional knowledge, especially in battleground states where officials have been harassed online and targeted with death threats.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• Half of the 76 million Americans who live in the western United States have a new chief local election official since the 2020 presidential election.
• In the 11-state region we analyzed, more than 160 chief local election officials have left their positions since November 2020. This represents roughly 40% of the total chief local election officials in the region.
• The officials who left their positions in the states our report features took with them more than 1,800 years of combined experience and the typical number of years of experience held by election administrators in these counties with new election officials dropped from about eight years to one year.

The costs of this election official exodus are real — especially in terms of psychological duress, lost institutional knowledge, and the financial impacts of recruiting, hiring, and training new people to fill these critical positions.

It is abundantly clear that this is a crisis for our democracy. A crisis that lawmakers and policymakers in Washington, D.C., can help curb by strengthening protections of election workers and fully funding our critical election infrastructure.

Election after election, local officials rise to the occasion to administer free and fair elections that are safe and secure. Now is the time for action to show we stand with them.

Read our new report, “The High Cost of High Turnover”!

Thanks for your support,

Michael Beckel
Research Director, Issue One

P.S. Share our report with your family and friends to help spread the word about this important issue.