Reporting from the Frontlines of America’s Elections

New UMD Report Shares Recommendations to Modernize How We Staff Elections

Whether you’re filling out your mail-in ballot or waiting in line at your local polling location, you probably aren’t thinking too much about how your fellow community members are faring on the other side of the process. UMD researchers are showcasing the experiences of the people who will be processing your mail-in ballot, preparing and maintaining the machine you will be voting on, and fielding questions from voters like yourself, among a multitude of other tasks.  

They are exploring topics such as: What stressors do volunteers and workers face in today’s political climate? What is it really like to run and work an election? And, how can we address the challenges faced by the folks who power elections? 

The insightful findings are shared in a new report by the University of Maryland’s new Election Resilience Lab, which is housed within the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE).

Under the direction of Election Resilience Lab Director Alysoun McLaughlin, the researchers conducted a first-of-its-kind study that involved going straight to the source to see and hear for themselves how 30 jurisdictions throughout 17 states operate during an election season. They went during election offices’ busiest time: The October and November of the 2024 presidential election year.

“When I proposed a project that would have us physically sitting in election offices during the peak season of an election, that surprised researchers; election officials spent so long browbeating academics to stay out of our way during the busy part of an election season,” said McLaughlin, who spent 14 years working as an election administrator herself. “But it makes a difference when you are showing up in an election office to do research that they see the value of, and that they need. It also helped build trust that we hired former election officials to do the observation, so they knew how to stay out of the way.”

The need for this unconventional, boots-on-the-ground approach became evident to the researchers following a literature review that they initially conducted for the study, which was commissioned by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) as part of a $490,000 grant.

“One of the surprising things we found was that most of the existing research on the elections workforce is from political science, and that’s a pretty narrow lens because a lot of this work should really come from public administration, which hasn’t really embraced elections for a variety of reasons,” CDCE Director Michael Hanmer said. “We had hoped that the literature review would help inform some of the things we were seeking to study, but in the end, it really didn’t; it exposed that there are even more gaps in knowledge about the election workforce and its needs than we thought there were.”

The report describes four major challenges the researchers observed across all of the studied jurisdictions—staffing, compensation, working conditions, and workload—and makes four core recommendations to address those challenges:

• Evaluate Workforce Capacity
• Clarify Skill Gaps and Development Needs
• Examine Your Workplace Culture
• Develop a Formal Action Plan

While some of the specific issues they witnessed didn’t make their way into the report—like McLaughlin watching an election director in Pennsylvania frantically search for toner because the ballot printer was running out more quickly than expected—the report does highlight case studies showing how different offices have met the needs of their workforce, from reclassifying job descriptions to advocating for more staff to meet rising demands.

The researchers also included a few of the organizational charts that they reviewed as part of the study, from San Joaquin County, California; Mercer County, Pennsylvania; and Buckeye Township, Michigan. The charts show how differently each jurisdiction approached structuring their election workforce, largely due to the size of their offices, and how the organizational chart in an election office scales up dramatically over the course of an election season.

The report also discusses different sources of labor, from temporary staffing to borrowing staff from other departments of local government.    

“There’s been a fair amount of research about chief elections officials since the 2000 election and there has also been a fair amount of research on poll workers. But the connective tissue in between—the staff and the supervisory, frontline and temporary workforce that holds it all together—there hasn’t been much attention to,” McLaughlin said. “That’s who we are shining a light on with this report, to help broaden the dialogue about election administration and the recruitment, retention and training of election officials, not just for the top job but for all the rest of the roles in the field.”

Job descriptions were also collected and analyzed, to inform decisions by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission about pursuing a workforce classification framework for election administration. 

The researchers don’t think that election officials will necessarily find all of their observations and recommendations groundbreaking, but they hope it provides them with the validation they need to get more support.

“We’re no longer administering elections like we did in the 1980s, but in many places around the country, our personnel budgets, our job classifications, and how we are structured to support elections haven’t changed to reflect the new realities of the demands on the roles,” McLaughlin said. “We are hoping that with this report, we can empower election officials to have conversations with their county boards, human resources, and budget offices to build their capacity to administer elections the way the public expects today.”

Even then, though, the work continues.

“We have a lot more questions now than answers, but they are very different questions we would have otherwise not had, and I think that's the real key to progress,” Hanmer said.

Read “The HR of Democracy: Understanding the Election Workforce”

Photo by iStock

Published on Tue, May 19, 2026 - 11:03AM