- May 22, 2026
- By John Tucker
To the list that includes paramedics, fighter pilots, teachers and air traffic controllers, it’s time to add another group of public servants coping with intense daily stress: election workers.
From full-time clerks to seasonal polling staffers, they’ve faced an explosion of scrutiny since 2020, with the criticism and difficult working conditions factoring into the highest turnover rate—a 41% jump from 2020 to 2024—in at least a quarter-century, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
New University of Maryland research found that they’re often underpaid, underappreciated and overworked. If steps aren't taken to address these difficulties, “people with institutional knowledge could leave in droves, and that opens up more concerns about mistakes,” said Michael Hanmer, professor of government and politics and director of the Center of Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE).
The research, published in a new report this week, was funded by a $490,000 U.S. Election Assistance Commission grant. That allowed a UMD team co-led by Alysoun McLaughlin, the CDCE’s Election Resilience Lab director and a former election administrator, and Lynn Handy, a public-sector workforce development expert, to observe and query workers in the two-month sprint to the November 2024 elections. The team of 10 former election officials and two human resources experts was given access to 30 elections offices in 17 states, reflecting diversity in geography and party affiliation among registered voters.
These findings were part of a larger study examining staffing practices in elections, creating a snapshot of the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of their peers who carry out elections. Hanmer unpacked its report, which offers not only lessons, but warnings as the 2026 election season approaches.
Why did you launch this study?
We believed that free and fair elections start with the workforce—that employing skilled people will solve future problems. These are complicated jobs that will get more complicated with physical and cybersecurity threats and new laws like those requiring voter ID. But the standard is perfection. It’s not like a bank, where if they screw up, you’re insured. If we don’t have timely results, people become concerned about the process.
How did you negotiate access to the local offices?
When we approached election officials, it was a really big ask: “We’re coming into your space, when the heat is on.” It was important to have someone to bridge some barriers. Alysoun spent 14 years as an election official and speaks the same language as workers and has that Spidey sense of when to ask a question, when to ask a follow-up and when to hang back to avoid interference.
Describe the data collection.
Running an election is an incredible undertaking, and we had many questions: How does the office expand with temporary staff closer to an election? What does it look like to process registration applications? What resources do you lack? How can other local or state government offices help? We used a survey that was only semi-structured, allowing it to flow organically.
What are the key takeaways?
Government agencies classify jobs based on things like skill set and education level; if someone’s doing the job of someone several levels up in seniority, they’re being underpaid. We saw a lot of mismatches of that sort. Titles are also jargony and can cause recruitment problems. “Election specialist 1” in one jurisdiction doesn’t sound as good as “technician supervisor” in another, but they might be the same thing. Overall, the workload for elections is changing, often faster than staffing can keep up. The report points to the importance of comprehensive workforce planning in elections, and how things like reclassifying job descriptions can help recruit and retain skilled workers.
Also, the staff, from temporary workers to supervisors, work extremely long hours. Studies show that overtime can boost productivity somewhat, but then it starts to drop. If it’s on a downturn too far before the election, that’s a potentially serious problem and points to a need to hire more staff.
Should people worry about these difficulties harming election integrity?
Lately there’s been more attention paid to this idea that there are nefarious things happening in elections offices, and it’s easy for the public to retreat into blame, especially when it’s fueled by people at high levels of government. We should be concerned about frontline workers not having time or resources to manage stress or mental fatigue. But the evidence suggests that despite those challenges, they’re doing a really good job. They put up with the stress because they believe what they’re doing is important.