The annual Local Election Official Survey from the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Portland State University is underway, and it’s worth participating in.

EVIC conducts this survey to better understand what’s happening in election offices across the country, directly from the people doing the work. The findings help inform conversations about election administration at the local, state, and national levels.

This year, the EVIC team is conducting the survey particularly close to Election Day to capture how issues and challenges are unfolding in real time.

Why does this matter?

There are plenty of people talking about election administration. It’s important that the experiences and perspectives of the people actually administering elections are part of those conversations.

Research like this helps tell that story. It can highlight challenges, identify trends, and give policymakers, researchers, and others a better understanding of what election officials are experiencing.

For a good example of how this research is used, take a look at EVIC’s recent analysis of job satisfaction among local election officials.

What should you expect?

The survey takes approximately 25 minutes to complete, but you can pause and return to it later. You won’t need to pull reports or look up statistics about your office. Instead, the questions focus on your experiences, how your office is engaging voters, responding to policy changes, and how you’re doing as an election official.

Your responses will be kept confidential.

How do you participate?

Not every election office will receive an invitation. If yours was selected, look for an email from leosurvey@pdx.edu with “2026 Local Election Official Survey” in the subject line.

It’s also worth checking your office’s general email inbox, since the invitation may have gone there rather than to you directly.

The survey will close just before Election Day, so there’s a relatively short window to participate.

I know this is an incredibly busy time, but if you received an invitation, I hope you’ll set aside a little time to complete it. The more we understand about what’s happening inside election offices, the better equipped we are to support the people who run our elections.

You can learn more about the LEO Survey on EVIC’s website. Questions can also be directed to Paul Manson at mansonp@pdx.edu.

It only looks at major disasters, as defined and labeled by FEMA, so there are certainly more things like this (“smaller” natural disasters, fires, etc.) that election administrators have worked through. This is the floor, not the ceiling.

A few things that stood out:

• Since 1976, there have been 282 disaster declarations for which the incident period (FEMA term) touched between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30 of an election year

• Of those, 40 were active on Election Day.

• Florida has had more of these declarations than any state, 21 in all, and has had at least one in each of the last five election windows.

Lastly, I’m thinking of friends and colleagues in the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf regions of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

One thing is for sure: No matter what happens, the election administration communities in those states will come together to make sure the election happens.

To start to get a bird’s eye view of how states approach this, I pulled every statute and regulation the Election Law Navigator tags under “Emergency Events and Powers” and sorted them.

Process

The Election Law Navigator is maintained by the Election Law Program, a joint venture of William & Mary Law School and the National Center for State Courts. The ELN makes a cursory review of a topic’s policy landscape possible in an afternoon.

ELP uses data from Clio, updated quarterly, and like every provider of state statutory, regulatory and judicial data, that data is only as accurate as what the states supply. Each ELN state page links to the state’s official published code.

I used an AI assistant to pull the tagged entries from all of ELN's state pages and to help organize them into a spreadsheet. Because I didn’t review every provision, the summary below is based on provision title and ELN’s tagging. Rather than guess, I marked provisions as “Other” when the title didn’t make it clear what the emergency connection is.

Very important: This is a survey of a portion of one database and its tagging. It is not the law. At the risk of stating the obvious, I’ll say that election officials should check their own laws from official sources. This is not gospel.

The Numbers

ELN has tagged content under “Emergency Events and Powers” in 40 jurisdictions: 38 states (plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Across these states, there are 206 catalogued provisions:

• 135 statutes

• 71 regulations

Thirteen states have nothing tagged: Alaska, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Types of Provisions

I sorted the 206 provisions into four piles.

• Jurisdiction-wide emergency: 158

  • Hurricanes, ice storms, power outages, machines that choose not to work at 7 a.m. … even after your team spent several months testing it to make sure it would work appropriately on that specific day. These are laws about the election itself being disrupted.

• The voter’s own emergency: 12

  • Emergency absentee ballots for the hospitalized, provisional ballots for first responders called away on Election Day, curbside help for someone who can’t get inside.

• Military and overseas voters: 9

  • Emergency procedures a chief election official can invoke when a deployment or a disaster cuts off a deployed voter.

• Other or unclear from the title: 27

What the Laws Do

Counting states rather than sections, here is how many have at least one tagged provision of each kind.

• Equipment failure and emergency paper ballots: 14 states

• Broad emergency powers or emergency rule-making for the chief election official or board: 14 states

• Postpone, reschedule or extend: 12 states

• Relocate or change polling places: 12 states

• A required contingency plan: 9 states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Washington)

• Poll worker shortage: 3 states

• Counting or canvassing during an emergency: 2 states

State by State

Thirty-four of the 40 jurisdictions have at least one jurisdiction-wide provision. Eleven have a voter’s-own provision. Seven have military and overseas emergency procedures. Only Oklahoma has all three.

Interested in learning more about how election officials approach emergency planning? Listen to the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s new podcast, The Unstoppable Vote, hosted by my friend and colleague Kyle Yoder.

Five states show only voter-level or military provisions and nothing jurisdiction-wide: Colorado, Mississippi, Nebraska, Vermont and Virginia. In ELN’s tagging, these states can help a hospitalized voter get a ballot and have nothing on the books for a natural disaster.

Get in Touch

The full spreadsheet – with every provision, ELN tags, code locations and ELN page links – is available on request.

Finally, if you know of a provision that’s missing, I’d like to hear about it. Email me at tj@readyfortuesday.com.

Join us Tuesday, September 29, at 12:00 p.m. ET for “Election Resources Election Officials May Not Know About.” We’ll be talking to Sean Greene, associate director for MEDSL, and Katy Owens, NCSL’s elections director, about their resources, how these are useful for election officials, and what’s on the horizon.

Register

MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) recently launched the Election Resource Hub as a compilation of existing research and offers evidence-based recommendations for election officials and practitioners. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) includes elections among its many topics and tracks election and campaign issues across the 50-states in several major categories: campaign finance, election policy and administration, election results and analysis, and initiative and referendum.

Books & Ballots is coordinated in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).
This panel webinar takes a practical look at how election offices build documentation practices that create transparency at every stage of the process: tracking ballot movement, closing the loop at end of day, and generating the kind of paper trail that makes the canvass clear and the answers ready before anyone asks.

Panelists will draw on experience across jurisdictions to share what strong documentation looks like in practice, where offices commonly fall short, and how to build systems that make accountability routine rather than reactive.

On a personal note, I owe Jennifer a great deal. She is the person who hired me at The Elections Group, and she continues to be generous with her mentorship and support.

In this Q&A, we discuss her path from the U.S. Air Force to an accidental first election, her years as elections director in Weber County, Utah and director of elections in Arapahoe County, Colorado, and the audit work she started in 2017 that has shaped most of the last decade for her.

This conversation is part of the ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles — research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

How did you end up in election administration? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

I was a candidate on the ballot several times. Then we had an unfortunate situation in our city. Our city clerk quit on the Friday before Election Day, and the mayor came and asked if I could help. More broadly, this is what set the initial hook and what still drives me. I like hard problems. I like thinking about how to solve challenging things. That was certainly one of them.

I spent a few days trying to figure out what was required to run an election. I read state statute. More importantly, I started talking to people and connecting with other city clerks. I picked up some of the basics from them, but I also came away feeling like I had a support network I could lean on if I needed it.

That is what got me in. What kept me is that I owe everything to that first election, and to the great poll workers who actually knew what they were doing, unlike me. Afterward I stepped back and thought, this went okay. We ran an election and it was successful. But it could be better. When you get deep into the weeds of what it takes to run an election, and you realize democracy hinges on this, you start to think maybe there is a better way to do it.

My time in the Air Force laid a lot of the foundation. It is a community where the ethos is that there is no room for error. Everything is done by the book. You have to have written procedures for everything. You learn your job, and not just the mechanics of it. It matters that you learn the broader history of the Air Force and understand the mission you are part of.

There is so much of that we can apply to election administration. You also spend a lot of time going through exercises so you can do your job under challenges and look for gaps in the way you prepared. And then there is the review, the audit, the Air Force inspector who comes in to look at how you are doing your job and highlight what you are doing well and where the gaps are. I really loved that. When I exited the Air Force, they were starting to embrace business process improvement, and I loved that too.

All of it unknowingly created a space for me. So when I became aware that I could make working in elections a career, I found a home.

A lot of people admire the way you serve as a connector between the people who run elections and the people who are interested in and research them. What did your time running elections teach you that people who have not done it cannot fully appreciate?

The timing and the preparation. Elections have become so much more complex, but that part has not changed.

Running an election is not like other things, where you can just prepare a lot in advance. Some things do have to be prepared far ahead. So there is a strategic planning element to it. Understanding the different tasks that need to happen, when they need to happen and who needs to do them, and then being able to orchestrate all of that.

I think many people do not understand that some things simply cannot happen until 30 days out, or 20 days out. You have to take advantage of whatever time you have to plan for how it is going to go, but you cannot actually do the thing until a deadline has passed. Few people understand what that looks like, or the pressure it puts on election officials.

You see it with people coming in new to the profession who have to face a large or prominent election. They do not fully understand it until they go through it. Then it hits them.

Election officials can understandably be skeptical of outsiders who show up with advice. You have been on both sides of that dynamic. How does your experience running elections shape the way you approach offices now?

Do not underestimate competency and caring.

It helps for an office to know that the person walking in can talk confidently about whatever they are there to support. Pre-election testing of equipment. Processing mail ballots. Getting a polling location set up. You can speak the same lingo. You can acknowledge what the challenge is and show you understand all the moving parts. That competency helps.

Sometimes it is also just acknowledging that this is hard, or that it feels overwhelming right now. Even when you are not walking into a crisis, even when you are only there to give advice, it helps to acknowledge that maybe we do not have all the answers. That human element matters. Show that you care.

Sometimes that has to come first, right? Meeting them where they are.

Right. Sometimes they need somebody to rant to, or a shoulder to cry on. Then we can talk about what it is we need to get done today.

This series exists in large part to get researchers and election officials to understand each other better and work together more. So let me ask you from the practitioner side. What do researchers get wrong or miss about the day-to-day reality of running elections? And are there strategies or tools that would make their work more useful to the people running elections?

Timing is the big one. Whatever they are researching or advocating for— a change in communication practices, how we do post-election audits, or analyzing voter registration data — time does not stop so the election official can focus on making that change, or implementing that practice, or even understanding the recommendation.

I have also encouraged a lot of those folks to find a way in. Go be a poll worker. Volunteer as a temporary worker. Shadow an election official, especially as we get closer to the election. But even when it is not deep in the election season, even on a normal day, go understand what the day-to-day reality looks like for an election office. Who is in the office? What does their staffing look like? Spending a day or two or three or five in an election officecould be tremendously helpful.

The research is great. But it is also important to fully understand the constraints on implementing the recommendations that come out of that research.

You started your audit work in 2017 and then left Arapahoe County in 2018. Since you worked in an election office, what has stayed the same, maybe stubbornly so, and what has changed the most?

There are so many more resources now, even than when I left. And there are far more resources for local election officials than when I started, which is to say there were none. At the time, I did not know where to go learn how a certain task should happen, or what a process should look like. I have been out of running local elections for almost 10 years, and we’ve thankfully seen a lot of progress made on resourcing that community since then.

Elections now are also much more complex, not only compared with when I started in 2009, but compared with when I left Arapahoe County in May 2018. The information environment especially. We did not have to navigate that.

What has stayed the same is that we are still understaffed. You have heard me say that election officials need three things to be successful. They need enough staff with the right skills. They need enough space to do their job. And they need the right equipment to do it.

We have started to narrow the gap on two of those; there has been more state and federal funding for equipment, and a lot of funding has gone toward new facilities. That has been great to see. But I still do not see the staffing gap closing.

So many offices have full-time employee levels that were never enough to begin with, and some are still carrying unfilled vacancies on top of that. That creates a constraint with a lot of downstream effects. It was true when I came in as an almost-office-of-one. When I moved to Weber County there were about four of us full time, plus a lot of temporary workers. I thought I was living large in Colorado because of the size of my team. Looking back, it was still really stressful for people. I do not know that it was a right-sized team for the number of voters we served. It continues to be a challenge for jurisdictions of every size across the country.

What problem in election administration do you think is most urgent and least addressed right now? Maybe that is just an extension of your last answer.

I think it is, because of what happens when you are understaffed. You do not have time for training. You do not have time for professional development. You do not have time for deeper strategic planning, or to work with the people who could help you with it. And you often do not have time for process improvement. I hear that a lot.

We have been doing a number of workshops this year directly with election offices, focusing on the creation of standard operating procedures. In the course of helping them document their processes, when you start to think about ways they could improve, you hear the same thing: we do not have the time to document how we do it today, let alone think about what it could be.

Staffing is more of a root cause than we realize.

Last question. If you were not working in elections, what would you be doing? I think I already know the answer to this one. Baker?

I would love to open a bakery.

The problem is that I do like hard problems and hard challenges, and I like feeling as though I am part of something bigger. So I am really interested in environmental issues. I keep close tabs on what is happening there, especially in my own state, as we deal with wildfires and water shortages and who gets to own the rights to land and what we do with that land. I find that really interesting. I am also really interested in women’s health and maternal health.

So if I were not working in elections, I would probably still be doing something very similar. Advocacy, or trying to contribute in some way to some of these harder problems we still have not solved.

It is narrated by Books & Ballots co-host Kyle Yoder and features Books & Ballots co-host Karen Brinson Bell helping tell the story of Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Part 1.

Give it a listen, and share it with folks who have questions or worries about whether and how the amazing community of election officials across the country will meet every challenge in 2026 and every election in the future. It is truly inspiring!

Available wherever you get your podcasts, including:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Amazon Music

YouTube

Episodes

Part 1 – After the Storm

After Hurricane Helene decimated western North Carolina in 2024, election officials raced to rebuild before a national election just 39 days away. Twelve years earlier, Hurricane Sandy had done the same to New York City — this time with only eight days before the vote. What was learned during Sandy and built by election officials in the years that followed made extraordinary resilience possible after Helene.

Featuring the voices of Karen Brinson Bell of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Buncombe County elections director Corinne Duncan, and MIT election scholar Charles Stewart III.

Part 2 – Unnatural Disasters

Election Day 2024 was hit not by natural disasters but by unnatural ones—more than 200 bomb threats in polling places across the US. A week earlier, ballot drop boxes had been set on fire. If chaos was the intention, it failed—the system absorbed the disruptions so cleanly that most voters never noticed.

Featuring the voices of Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, and CEIR Executive Director David Becker.

Part 3 – Hyperlocal

A massive fire destroys nearly every piece of voting equipment in the third largest county in the country—just 67 days before a national election.

Featuring the voice of current Harris County TX Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth and the story of former Clerk Beverly Kaufman.

Part 4 – When the Disaster is Everywhere

Despite a deadly pandemic that reached every precinct, city, and state in the middle of a presidential election, election officials in 2020 delivered the highest-turnout election in American history.

Featuring Rhode Island Director of Elections Rob Rock, Weld County, Colorado Clerk Carly Koppes, MIT’s Charles Stewart III, and CEIR’s David Becker.

Part 5 – Unstoppable

Not even a foreign army’s presence on American soil or a devastating civil war has delayed or canceled a federal general election. And for more than a century and a half, it has been a crime to deploy armed agents to the polls.

Featuring author and political scientist Donald Zinman, MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III, and CEIR Executive Director David Becker.

The team at ERL is interested in hearing from election officials with a range of staffing levels, resources and responsibilities.

Whether you have been part of developing the standards, are actively applying for certification, are only vaguely aware that they exist, or have never heard of them at all, they want to hear from you. Sign up by clicking here or the button below.

Sign Up to Participate

If you have questions, email Alysoun McLaughlin at alysoun@umd.edu.

If you choose to participate, all you’ll have to do is email your poll workers with a link to a survey. The academic researchers involved with NEWS will then provide you with an analysis of poll workers in your jurisdiction.

Keep reading to learn more or contact a member of the steering committee by September 1 to get started.

This Books & Ballots spotlight focuses on an ongoing researcher-practitioner partnership. Please direct any questions to members of the steering committee, listed at the bottom of this post.

What is NEWS?

The National Election Worker Survey (NEWS) is a partnership between local election officials and academic researchers from across the country to learn more about the experiences of poll workers. In 2022 and 2024, NEWS surveyed more than 8,000 poll workers across 22 jurisdictions, and the team is hoping to grow that number in 2026.

NEWS asks poll workers about their recruitment, training, on-the-job experiences, and perspectives about election processes. Participating election officials receive an analysis of poll workers responses in their jurisdiction, and researchers can examine broader results to look for higher-level trends.

For election officials, these findings provide a clearer picture of their poll workers — who they are, what they need, and how to better recruit, train, and retain them.

For researchers and others, NEWS provides insights from poll workers across the country to understand their experiences and inform election administration policies and practices.

What NEWS asks of local election officials

Participating election officials just need to share the survey link with their poll workers.

Contact the research team by September 1 to get started or learn more.

What do local election officials get in return?

Participating jurisdictions receive a customized analysis of their poll workers’ responses, allowing you to better understand your workforce’s experiences, training needs, recruitment challenges, and more.

In short, you’ll get systematic data on your poll workers’ needs and ensure your community is represented in the national sample.

The researchers want this research to work for you. If there’s something specific you’d like to learn about your workforce, please let them know and they’ll do their best to get that question on the survey.

Who is behind this project?

A team of more than 30 researchers from universities across the country are participating in the 2026 National Election Worker Survey.

The 2026 survey is led by a steering committee of experienced election scholars, including several who you will recognize from past Books & Ballots.

If you’d like to work with an academic researcher in your state or area, please contact a member of the steering committee by September 1st to get involved.

If you have questions, reach out to any of the steering committee members:

• Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Joseph Coll, Texas Tech University

• Matt Lamb, Texas Tech University

• David Kimball, University of Missouri-St. Louis

• Anita Manion, University of Missouri-St. Louis

New research auditing thousands of local election websites found that most carry only a fraction of the basic information voters look for. A meaningful share offers almost nothing at all, and rural jurisdictions consistently trail their metro neighbors. And the content is only half the picture. A site can carry every item on the list and still be unusable for a voter who navigates by keyboard or relies on a screen reader.

Join us Thursday, August 27 at 1 p.m. ET for a practical conversation about what election websites offer voters, who can actually use them, and the compliance deadline ahead.

Register

This Books & Ballots conversation looks at election websites from both sides. What information is there, and is it reachable? We will walk through what the research has found, which problems have proven stubborn, and how an office can run basic tests without a consultant or a large budget. We will also talk through the federal accessibility rules coming into effect and the deadlines attached to them.

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

In this Q&A, we discuss his path from a master’s in public administration to consulting work on the West Coast to a PhD in public affairs and policy, the beer with Paul Gronke that turned into a job, and what the Local Election Official Survey is trying to accomplish as it approaches the 25th anniversary of the Help America Vote Act.

We also get into his advice for researchers who want their work to matter to practitioners, why he thinks public administration scholars bring something distinctive to the field, and the difference between studying what elections cost and studying how they are funded.

This conversation is part of the ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles — research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

How did you end up studying election administration as a political scientist? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

I can play a political scientist on TV. But no, not technically. My PhD is in public affairs and policy and it was more focused on policy studies and public administration.

Here is the deep history. I started out as a practitioner. After I finishing my master’s in public administration, I spent about a decade in the consulting world with state and local governments on the West Coast. I did a lot of support for transportation planning, environmental planning, land use, facilitation, public meetings, surveys, and a lot of just whatever would be helpful for counties, cities, the state and sometimes a federal partner.

Somewhere around 2010, I started getting grants as a consultant to do research for federal agencies, including through the Transportation Research Board. And I thought, “wow, people get paid to ask questions and go read things and talk to people? That is fun.” That convinced me to start thinking about going back to grad school for a PhD. A grant came through with a faculty member I know well that could support me, so I went back.

Public affairs and policy tends to focus on policy studies. How policy evolves. How policy gets implemented. My doctoral work was survey-based research in Oregon on attitudes toward environmental issues, so I was doing a lot of natural resources and environmental law and policy work. Much of it with a focus on the local government level.

Then in 2018, Paul Gronke was literally just across the river. We would chat professionally and as friends, and he mentioned he was trying to get this survey thing going again that had not happened since the Congressional Research Service work. They were having some challenges on the survey administration side. How do we do it? How do we get the survey out in the field? How do we get response rates up? How do we write the questions? I said, let’s get a beer and talk about it. That turned into a job.

So I started working with Paul at EVIC as an almost-done-with-a-PhD graduate research appointment, and it grew from there. The story I tell is that I have always been a local government scholar. I have always done work with local governments and I have always been interested in that space. I was also a survey researcher. The two came together for this elections work. I entered the election administration research world first and foremost as a survey researcher doing local government work, then pivoted into the nitty-gritty of election administration.

What has that experience been like, working with and learning from election administrators across the country?

It is really interesting, and I have a useful comparison because I still do other local government work in different areas. I have research in emergency management, looking at how cities and counties do their planning for disaster preparedness and response. I also do some workforce and HR research, surveying offices on their structures, their internships and career development.

Compared to that work, election offices are way more diverse. The type of work they do, the way they structure their work, the state rules, the local rules. It varies so much more than in those other fields.

An emergency manager will vary from state to state to some degree, but there is a framework nationally that really helps structure that, and there is a strong association structure and an accreditation system. So they all think and speak a little bit more of a similar language. You see the same thing with HR professionals. They are thinking about federal law that guides their work and compliance, so it is structured very similarly. Even in some environmental policy areas. I get to do some fun parks planning work, and there are national standards for how to do parks planning.

Elections are just so decentralized that you could randomly pick five offices and they will not look the same. They are going to look very different very often. That is driven in part by how much election administration varies state to state, and how much it varies even within a state based on county structure or town or township.

So that diversity of practice is just really, really interesting. I know it is also a source of challenges for folks who want to draw broad conclusions about the state of practice.

How do you approach practitioners in a way that makes them less likely to be skeptical of your work or your intentions?

First and foremost, they are the experts. They know their stuff, and I am here to get told where I am wrong. That has always been how I approach this.

There are general things we can all hear about out there in the world. But when you get into the day-to-day details of election administration work, that expertise is going to be with the practitioners. So I defer to that. What I want to do is help capture as many of those stories as I can and see where there are common through lines that others can learn from, or identify places where there are bumps in the road. By looking across the U.S., we might learn about different practices that help address a problem, or anticipate potential pain points if there are shifts in court cases, federal legislation or state legislation.

The other piece that really drives this, and it is part of the model I have here with the university, is co-production. What that means is we want to make sure any research we do adds value to the field, and that practitioners have a seat at the table in the design of research where we can manage it.

You see that with the Local Election Official Survey. We reach out where we can to officials who might have good ideas about where the research should go. An association will tell us they need to know more about a particular issue. A state office will say that if we add some sort of national measure they could compare against, it would help them understand whatever it is they are studying better. That co-production piece is key. We are academics who want to engage. I am not the practitioner, but I want to bring the academic piece to help them out.

Can we pull on that thread a little more? Beyond the survey, what are the concrete things researchers can do to make their work more relevant and more applicable to what practitioners actually experience?

There are a couple of strategies, and this holds for local government work broadly, not just elections.

When I talk to other shops that do this kind of work, I always encourage them to think about creating a “kitchen cabinet” or group of advisors. Those might be the local government contacts you have in your region, the city managers, the county executives, whoever is relevant to the policy domain you work on. Have some sort of informal way to touch base with them. Make it a place to listen more than a place to tell them about your cool research. Look for what their worries are, what they are trying to read the tea leaves on, and then think about what research questions might help them work through that uncertainty or figure out what comes next.

The main recommendation I always make is to be available and be present. Be happy to do a brown bag lunch for their staff. Go hang out at the state capitol or at city hall or at the county offices. Just be present and available. At the same time, look for places to be helpful when folks are engaging through their state associations of counties and cities or the local equivalent of NACo. That is a great place to be, and you learn a lot there.

I was at a conference last week, and probably 50% of the value for me was just hearing what people are worried about and what they are working through. Being present also builds relationships, so at some point some of those offices will call you up and say they are struggling with a question and ask if you can help.

You mentioned that academia is not always set up to reward that kind of work. Paul Gronke has talked about the same thing. How much of a barrier is it?

It is a real one. This is more true in some disciplines than others, but we are rewarded for doing good work, not necessarily for doing helpful work. That does not mean good work is not good, or that helpful work is not good. It is just a different rewards structure, and I think that is an unfortunate barrier.

What I will say is that I feel more at home in a public administration department in many ways, and in that discipline we do not have the same incentive structure. What has been interesting about the election administration space is that it has been more heavily political science. There are more political scientists, just numerically. There are probably 10 times as many in the U.S.

But watching how ESRA has evolved, or even the Southern Political Science Association meeting. We are seeing more public administration scholars playing a bigger role, and more sociologists and historians – engineers too! There are other disciplines that can add to the conversation and that may have reward structures more helpful to practitioners. Public administration makes a ton of sense to me, hands down, in part because we tend to train a lot of the staff at the local level.

Tell me about the Local Election Official Survey and what you want people to understand about it.

Paul Gronke has been thinking about an event on the horizon: next year is the 25th anniversary of HAVA. So where are we, looking back over this period? Some initial survey work was done right after the passage of that legislation to assess those first impacts. Our work is really meant to extend that long view now. Twenty-five plus years of how local election officials are doing, what challenges they face and what they need to be successful. Since 2018, when we restarted this effort, we have tried to continue that thread every year.

The way we put it is that we want the survey to amplify local voices. What are the things happening at the township, city and county level that policymakers need to hear and that state houses need to hear, but might not, absent the survey? There are other ways officials can voice their pain points, of course. But that is our goal here.

The second goal is to bring a tool that helps election officials themselves advocate for what they need. I know of a number of jurisdictions that have pulled in our data to advocate for hiring increases or pay increases, because they can point to a national number and say, we are not like these other numbers and we are trying to adjust and catch up. We want to help in that way.

The third area is supporting academic teams and nonprofit teams that are struggling to know things about these offices. One thing that has really evolved in the last three or four years is that we are now a multi-university team, and we try to coordinate across a lot of different groups looking at different research questions. So we are also trying to build the data infrastructure for election administration research.

What is the question in election administration you think is most urgent and most understudied right now?

I am going to pick one of my favorites. We spend a lot of time in different fields arguing about the cost of elections. I worry about the ongoing sustainability of the funding of elections.

I do not know that we have a clear sense of what the different revenue and budget models are across states. We have some hints, based on whether states are supporting elections with some mix of state general fund and local funds, whether they are using reimbursement rates, whether they are using non-election-related enterprise revenues. The way we have taped and baling-wired our funding for elections is a different question than the cost side.

That is something we really need to pay attention to, because I think it is more sensitive to political and macroeconomic forces that have nothing to do with the needs in an election office, but that would absolutely be a threat to an election office if things turn the wrong direction.

There are a lot of shorter-term things we worry about too. The degree to which local offices are ready to take on the legal challenges of any federal or state shenanigans around elections, for one. Do they have access to attorneys? Do they know how to access them? Do they know what to ask for? And obviously there are all the postal service worries out there. But a lot of that is short-term policy noise, and part of the work is figuring out what is noise and what is real.

Last question. If you weren’t studying elections, what would you be doing?

If I was allowed to do it, I would go build wooden boats. I would have a nice shop, maybe somewhere on Puget Sound, maybe on the Oregon coast, and I would build some pretty sailboats.

Nice and quiet life. Get out on the water in the evenings.

The 10^th Annual ESRA conference was held this June on the campus of Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona. Participants from academia, state and local election government, nonprofits, and research institutes came to Maricopa County to discuss election administration across the US. As with every year, many great ideas were shared within the walls of the conference.

Join us Thursday, July 30, at 1 p.m. ET for A Look Back at ESRA 2026. We’ll be talking to Bill Gates – Executive Director of the ASU Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory (MODL), former Maricopa County Supervisor, and ESRA 2026 host – as well as other participants who shared work at the conference in June. We’ll also share more about the conference and how you can stay up-to-date about ESRA 2027.

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Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

Election officials have to be prepared for anything. But a recent survey of local election officials found that less than half had coordinated with emergency response agencies before the last general election. Natural disasters are a matter of “when,” not “if,” and the conversation focused on what election officials could do to prepare themselves, their offices, and their jurisdictions.

This Books & Ballots discussion brought together election experts for a practical conversation about emergency preparedness, resilient elections, and how officials could get ready before disaster strikes.

Karen Brinson Bell of Advance Elections and MEDSL discussed the Partnership for Elections and Emergency Response, a national initiative designed to bridge the gap between election administration and emergency management. Drs. Paul Manson of Portland State University and Mara Suttmann-Lea of Connecticut College shared practical takeaways and findings from their research into election officials’ disaster response.

With the election cycle already underway, the conversation explored what election officials could do to shore up readiness for natural disasters and what they should be thinking about over the long term to build the groundwork for more resilient elections.

Books & Ballots is a webinar series, Substack, and podcast on Spotify hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and MIT Election Data + Science Lab.

Apply

The deadline to apply is Friday, July 10. Partial support for conference attendance may be available.

Contact Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu for more information.

​

Join us Tuesday, June 30, at 1 p.m. ET for a practical discussion with election experts about emergency preparedness, fostering resilient elections, and what election officials can do to get ready for when disaster strikes.

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As part of this Books & Ballots conversation, Karen Brinson Bell (Advance Elections; MEDSL) will discuss the Partnership for Elections and Emergency Response, a new national initiative to bridge the critical gap between election administration and emergency management. Drs. Paul Manson (Portland State University) and Mara Suttmann-Lea (Connecticut College) will highlight practical takeaways and findings from their respective research into election officials’ disaster response.

With the 2026 election cycle already underway, we’ll talk about what election officials can be doing now to shore up their readiness for whatever natural disasters may strike. We’ll also discuss the long term, including what officials should be thinking about to start building the groundwork for even more resilient elections.

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

In this Q&A, we discuss her path from political science in Greece to a campaigning program at the University of Florida (Go Gators!) to the study of voter registration and election communications.

We also get into why she believes informational barriers deserve as much attention as institutional ones, what a year of driving around Mississippi taught her about building trust with skeptical election officials, and which underserved voters she thinks the field still has not studied closely enough.

This conversation is part of the ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles — research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

Describe what it was like growing up in Greece.

I was born in Athens. Greece is a small country, and I had a pretty normal childhood. I was an athlete. I played basketball, and that was a big part of my life until I left for graduate school. College was fun, and not as intense or stressful as it is in the United States.

Politics was always part of my life. Both of my parents were politically active. When I was in college, my dad ran for mayor of his town, and I ran his campaign as his campaign manager and communications director. That planted the bug for campaigning. The socialization around voting that we talk about in the United States, I lived it. I went to vote with my parents and watched how it worked. Voting in Greece is very different. You vote on paper, it is a list-based system, you put your ballot in an envelope and then in a box.

Another value that guides my work comes from there. I believe in the right to vote. I understand abstention as a political choice, but I believe in the act of voting. It matters that we vote. Being part of a team shaped me too, and I bring that into my research and my teaching. Elections are a big team.

Athens is often called the birthplace of democracy. Does that ever feel like a through line for you?

I like to claim that heritage. When I came to the United States, I was proud to say it. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are very different things, but when I say I am from Greece, there is always respect and appreciation for what the Greeks contributed to democracy. So I will take the credit!

How did you end up studying election administration as a political scientist? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

Election science was not the plan. I got my undergraduate degree in political science in Greece, and I wanted to be a diplomat. I was going to work in Brussels for the European Union, be a very cool diplomat and live the life.

I started getting interested in campaigning in 2009. I spent six months in Brussels working for the EU during the European Parliament elections, and I got to work with a few big-name campaigners from the United States. One of them was Joe Trippi. He was talking about communicating through social media and how it would transform elections and campaigns. That pulled me further into the campaigning world.

That is how I started thinking more intentionally about graduate school. I chose the University of Florida because it is one of the few schools with a political campaigning program. Even then, election research was not the plan. I figured I would get my degree, go back to Europe, campaign and maybe still be a diplomat.

Like a lot of these origin stories, I stumbled into election administration. I was taking a class on bureaucratic politics, and I read a paper by Martha Kropf and David Kimball on provisional voting and HAVA. I was deep in learning about American elections at the time, the Electoral College, federalism, all of it, because I did not have that background from Greece. European elections work very differently. We do not register to vote; the system is more uniform. Coming to the United States and seeing this infrastructure, I was mesmerized and puzzled that it could be so different depending on where you live.

I read that paper and thought it was gold. Provisional voting is fascinating and complicated, and voter registration sits at the heart of it. That is how I got drawn in. I was fortunate to work with Dan Smith and Michael McDonald, who had already built a network with election officials and did a lot of applied research, so I was exposed to that early.

From there I went deeper into the details, especially voter registration. Why does it differ across the states? How do all those small rules, from the registration deadline to where you sign the form to how the form is designed, shape who makes it onto the rolls and who does not? Not being a citizen actually helped me think more institutionally about how these systems should be designed. People used to ask how I could study this when I was not even a citizen and had never voted. I would say I am completely unbiased in that respect.

Now I am in it. There is no way out. I live and breathe election administration.

A lot of your work focuses on the communications side of election administration, which in some ways is the piece closest to campaigns. What keeps that interest alive?

The value that drives my work is that everyone should have equal access to voting. It is about voting rights and how we protect the right to vote. It is very voter-centric. How do we design a system where voters have the opportunity to participate, have positive experiences and can hold their representatives accountable?

That has grounded my research. Most of my work over the last five or six years has been about communications, but it started with institutions: how we design policy, how policy shapes administration and how administration shapes behavior.

Through that work, it became clear that we had spent a lot of time on institutional barriers and not enough on informational ones, and that one shapes the other. Even an accessible policy does not help if people do not know it exists or do not know how to use it. A turning point for me was a report Paul Gronke wrote with Natalie Adona, when she was still at the Democracy Fund, on the voter experience in 2018. Some voters said their state did not have online voter registration when it actually did. People were not using it because they did not know about it. We had spent so much time on voter suppression and restrictions, but even good policies can have bad outcomes if people do not know about them. That is when we started thinking more seriously about information and communications. Then in 2020, with COVID, it became clear that social media is a new frontier for exchanging information, and that election officials are part of that network. So we should study what they do.

Books & Ballots exists to make researchers more accessible to election officials, and the other way around. So much of that work runs on relationships. How do you approach building them, especially with officials who start out skeptical?

Context matters a lot. When I was in Florida, at least around St. Petersburg and Gainesville, the election official community was already aligned with research. Supervisors of Elections collaborated with researchers. It was easy to invite a supervisor to class to talk about registration, and they were excited to hear about my work.

When I moved to Mississippi, it was much harder. Election officials there were skeptical. The questions were, what do you want, are you going to sue me, what are your motivations. There was real distance from the research community.

So my approach was to spend time. I was fortunate to get a grant from MIT that let me do it, and I spent my first year on the tenure track driving around Mississippi meeting election officials in person. I told them I was a researcher who wanted to build relationships and support the community, and that I did not have an agenda beyond doing research and supporting their work. It was time-intensive, but it was fun, illuminating and insightful. I brought students into the process, which helped me build relationships with officials within about a two-hour radius of Starkville. Even getting an audience with the secretary of state was hard at first. Once [Mississippi Secretary of State] Michael Watson was elected, it became much easier to work with that office.

It took good faith and a lot of reassurance that I did not have bad intentions. It matters that election officials feel safe, that they trust we have good intentions and are not just there to take their data and publish a paper. We are part of the community, and we want to share our expertise and secure democracy together. Every time I talk with election officials, the first thing I ask is, how can I support you? What do you want to do, and how can we help you get there? I try to be a resource. And I always thank them for their service, because the job is very hard and they deserve far more credit than they get.

You spent years studying American elections as a non-citizen, and you recently became a U.S. citizen. What has that transition meant for how you see your work?

It makes it feel more real. People who criticize the process always say you have to live it, you have to be a poll worker, you have to vote, you have to go through it yourself. I already had a lot of faith in the system from my conversations and my work as an observer. But now I am excited to gain insights I can only get as a voter and to bring those lenses to my research.

I was not able to vote in 2024. I did not get my citizenship in time. The June primary in Maryland will be my chance, and the first thing I want to do is register and serve as a poll worker. I think that will help me see things my perspective has been missing. I will be a fuller researcher once I have lived through the process.

What’s the question in election administration you think is most urgent and most understudied right now?

One of the least studied areas we need to understand better is language minority voters and voters with disabilities, and their distinct needs. That population is very hard to study systematically. We also need to spend more time on primary elections and how they are run, and on the role of parties in selecting and training poll workers, all the structures around core election administration that shape how it functions. Budgets matter, of course. But I would prioritize underserved voters and how we can study and understand their experiences intentionally and respectfully so we can serve them better, especially in states where resources are scarce and where the typical election official does not resemble those voters.

Last question. If you weren’t studying elections, what would you be doing?

That is a hard one. I think I would still be somewhere near political science, but I would most likely be running for parliament in the European Union. If I had stayed in Europe, I would be politically active and trying to be a legislator there. And probably still playing some basketball on the side.

The survey is from past Books & Ballots speakers at the Engineering for Democracy Institute at the University of Rhode Island, led by Professor Gretchen Macht. All survey responses are anonymous. The survey is part of a project to identify simple and effective ways to make election administration safer and healthier. The EDI team presented an earlier part of this research on safely working around noisy mail ballot processing machines in a Books & Ballots session last year:

You may also remember the practical and helpful tools developed by EDI’s team of engineering researchers specifically for election administrators. A Books & Ballots session (link below) earlier this year highlighted practical applications including VoteTime.app to estimate voter wait times, VBMTime.app to project vote-by-mail processing workloads, BallotStorage.app to calculate warehouse space and storage costs, and VoteLayout.app to design polling place layouts.

Remember to register for this month’s Books & Ballots on Wednesday, May 20 at 2 p.m. ET for a practical discussion about the people side of election administration:

Join us Wednesday, May 20 at 2 p.m. ET for a practical discussion about the people side of election administration and the questions every office is wrestling with right now.

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This Books and Ballots conversation brings together academics and practitioners from the University of Maryland’s Election Resilience Lab, where researchers and election officials are working side by side to better understand the HR of democracy. We’ll talk about recruitment, retention, training, and succession planning in election offices, and what makes each of these uniquely difficult in this field. How do you build a workforce pipeline when the work is cyclical, the pay is often modest, and the scrutiny has never been higher? What workforce development practices translate from other fields, and which don’t? And how can research and practice inform each other in ways that make both stronger?

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

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This edition of Elections à la Carte will focus on strategies for creating new sources of revenue from the local, state, and federal levels. The panel will include:

• Mary Hall: The auditor for Thurston County, Washington – who will share information about a ballot real estate model under which local, state, and federal governments provide funding for election costs based on the ballot races at each government level,

• Joseph Anthony: An assistant professor of political science at the State University of New York, Cortland – who proposes designating local election jurisdictions as special districts with the ability to receive a defined share of local revenue or to levy taxes themselves, and

• Lana Goitia-Paz: Senior Georgia campaign manager with All Voting is Local and a student in Auburn University’s master of public administration program – who advocates for states to create an endowment fund for elections as a source of sustainable funding.

The panel will offer a brief explanation of their ideas, which will be followed by an in-depth discussion of revenue creation for election administration. Before the webinar, attendees are encouraged to submit questions they would like the panel to discuss to Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu. The panel will try to address as many questions as time permits.

If you would like to read the panelists’ full proposals before the event, you can use the following links:

• Mary Hall: https://auburn.box.com/s/7xs33qcr69n0coxseg5jv0ac5149xwbf

• Joseph Anthony: https://auburn.box.com/s/vflp2d4rz9he5qjll3r96kudsy3765r5

• Lana Goitia-Paz: https://auburn.box.com/s/c2zb6jgs3l961h2y79buo75f7a326pov

For questions or for further information, contact Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu.

The 10th Annual ESRA Conference runs Monday, June 1 through Thursday, June 4, 2026, hosted by Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory (MODL) at the Beus Center for Law and Society in downtown Phoenix. Whether you’re a county clerk, a state-level administrator, an academic, or someone else whose work touches election administration, ESRA is built around the questions you’re already wrestling with and the evidence that can help answer them.

Register

What’s on the Program

This year’s program brings together cutting-edge research and frontline practice across the issues shaping elections right now: administration and management, voter registration and turnout, election technology and security, law and policy, accessibility and inclusion, poll worker recruitment and retention, elections communications and public confidence, and rigorous evaluation of the policies, programs, and innovations changing the field.

Past ESRA conferences have drawn senior academics and junior scholars, election officials at every level, poll workers, nonprofit leaders, computer scientists, and technologists. The collaborative atmosphere is the point — it’s a meeting of the minds you won’t find anywhere else.

Register and Stay in the Loop

A notional agenda and travel information for the 2026 conference are now available, with detailed program information going out to registered attendees in the coming weeks.

In this Q&A, we discuss his path from studying elections and voting in Africa to working on rural field research in the United States to becoming the first research director at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, what he’s learned from listening to rural election administrators, why some officials may be skeptical when researchers show up, and the communication and staffing challenges facing some of the country’s smallest and most remote jurisdictions.

This conversation is part of the ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles — research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

How did you end up studying election administration as a political scientist? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

It was definitely not something I set out to do. I started out studying elections and voting in Africa. Most of my doctoral work and dissertation focused on that, and I spent a lot of time doing fieldwork in African countries — monitoring elections, observing, and talking with people about their voting experiences and about life in new democracies.

After graduate school, I moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for a consulting firm, Fors Marsh. Initially, I was doing survey methodology and data science work, but I pretty quickly got moved into a large project for the Food and Drug Administration that involved fieldwork across rural America. At that same company, I also ended up working on election administration projects with the Federal Voting Assistance Program through the Department of Defense. That was really the first time I became interested in American elections. I had never set out to study them.

Later, when Charles Stewart started the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, I took a job there as the first research director. That solidified my interest in election administration. So it was not a planned path. I was never especially interested in American elections at the beginning. But through that series of experiences — fieldwork, rural research, federal voting projects, and then MIT — I became very interested in the work.

There seem to be some loose connections between your earlier work in Africa, your rural fieldwork in the United States, and your current work on election administration. Is there a through line?

Yes, there is. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. My family farms rice and soybeans, and I grew up in a very rural, small-town environment. So I have a rural experience in my own life, and I fully appreciate the rural lived experience. When I was doing fieldwork in Africa, a lot of that work also took place in rural areas. There are obviously cities in African countries, but a large percentage of the population lives in very rural places.

When I later worked on the FDA project in rural America, someone at the company knew I had that fieldwork experience and thought there might not be that much difference between managing a large rural field project in Africa and managing one in rural America. And in many ways, that was true. You deal with internet connectivity issues. If you are doing surveys and need to load data in real time, you need hotspots, cell service, tablets, software, and backup plans. You have to think carefully about how you coordinate people who are going out into the field. Safety and logistics matter in ways that they often do not when you are working in an urban center and asking people to come to a research location.

That work also got me interested in how we measure rural America. I found that people’s perceptions of what “rural” means vary a lot. Many people I worked with had grown up on the East Coast or West Coast, and their idea of rural America was often quite different from the reality. It was not necessarily negative, but it often missed important parts of the lived experience. When I moved into election administration, I started asking similar questions: How do these things vary across the election system? Most of our elections are administered at the local level — counties, municipalities, jurisdictions — and those places are very different from one another. Implementing public policy in a very urban place is different from implementing it in a very rural one. That is where those threads came together for me: rural life, fieldwork, measurement, public administration, and election administration.

What has your experience been like learning from rural election administrators?

One of the first things I learned is that many rural election administrators are not especially plugged into the conversations that people like you and I are used to having. A co-author of mine, William McLean, and I recently published an article in the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice based on interviews we conducted with rural election administrators in the lower Mississippi Delta region. We talked with officials across six states. We chose that area partly because we are local to it, but also because it receives relatively little attention — not only in election administration, but more broadly.

What we found was interesting. Many of the officials we spoke with were not aware that people were studying their work or even interested in it. But once they realized that researchers were interested, they were often excited. There was a sense of, “We didn’t know anyone cared about what we do.” At the same time, they are not always talking with their urban counterparts. They may talk to neighboring jurisdictions, people at state association meetings, or people in their state offices. But there is often an assumption that things are so different in urban areas that there is not much to compare.

And maybe they are very different. We need to study that more. But at least from the rural administrators’ perspective, urban jurisdictions have more staff and infrastructure, while rural jurisdictions have fewer resources but may know many of their voters personally. So there is excitement about the possibility of collaboration and learning from others, but it does not seem like there is as much of that happening as there could be.

Were there examples of rural election officials who were hesitant or skeptical about researchers coming in?

Yes, there were. And I want to be clear that this is not unique to election administration. I saw similar dynamics in the FDA project. People in rural areas are sometimes worried about what outsiders think of them. They may assume, sometimes incorrectly, that people who are more educated, wealthier, or from urban areas look down on them.

That dynamic can be present when researchers enter the picture. If you call someone in Arkansas and say you are from an Arkansas university, that probably gives you a better inroad than saying you worked with the Election Assistance Commission or used to work at MIT. Those credentials may sound impressive, but they can also be intimidating. People may worry that you are looking for something they are doing wrong or that your goal is to expose some failure.

That is usually not the intent. But from their perspective, they are managing the best they can with limited resources, trying to do the job in front of them. Having an outside researcher come in can feel like one more complication. In some places, there was a little standoffishness that took time to work through. In other cases, I am not sure we ever fully worked through it.

I grew up in places that I think of as rural-adjacent but also suburban-adjacent. There were plenty of cows around, and my mom owns a farm, but I could still get to a Starbucks in 15 minutes. That probably says something about how slippery the word “rural” can be. When you talk about rural election administration, what do you actually mean?

There are different ways to measure rural. If we are talking about election administration, I think administrative measures are probably the most useful. Those often operate at the county level. There are several federal measures that look at things like population, adjacency to a metropolitan area, and remoteness.

There are also more granular measures, and there are identity-based measures. If we are talking about rural voters, vote choice, or political identity, then rural identity may matter a lot. Someone might identify as rural because they run cattle or live outside a city, but if they can get to Starbucks or a mall in 15 minutes, their lived experience is different from someone who is an hour or more from those kinds of services.

For election administration, we were mostly looking at very small, remote counties. In many cases, the entire county had fewer than 20,000 people. In some places, especially in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, we were looking at counties with only a few thousand people. That is quite different from a county of 130,000 people that has a city of 80,000 people with most modern amenities. Even if parts of that county feel rural, the ability to drive 10 or 15 minutes to a larger place is very different from being an hour or more away.

What are the election administration questions you think are most urgent and understudied right now?

One major issue is list maintenance. That is not my main area of expertise, and I know a lot of people are working on it, but I think it is incredibly important. It varies widely from state to state, and it connects to so many current conversations about citizenship, immigration status, voter fraud, and voter eligibility. Many of those issues are relatively minor in actual scale, but they play a large role in our politics. That can filter down and affect election administration.

For example, fear and misunderstanding could lead a state to consider major operational changes, such as requiring all hand-counted paper ballots. That would create enormous challenges for election officials, especially in places that are already understaffed and under-resourced. More broadly, I think there is a real lack of understanding among the public about how list maintenance works, how voter rolls are maintained, who is eligible to vote, and what safeguards already exist.

Within the rural election administration work I study more closely, two issues come up again and again. The first is communication. Many rural election officials worry that they cannot effectively communicate with their voters. They worry that voters do not have good information, and they are not sure how to get good information to them. They are concerned about turnout, changes in polling place locations, and how those changes affect voters. The second is staffing. In the most remote and least-resourced places, election officials are often trying to run elections with a skeleton crew. Retired people who have served as poll workers for years may no longer be able to do it. People are leaving these communities. In some cases, jurisdictions may struggle to meet state mandates or legal requirements for staffing.

That is concerning. Elections are still happening, and people are doing the best they can. But the experience for both voters and election officials may not be what it should be — and may not be what the law intends.

The two big rural challenges you name — communication and staffing — both feel easy to identify and very hard to solve. Are there promising solutions, or is the first step just understanding the problem better?

No, and that is part of what makes them so difficult. When I talk about communication challenges, people often ask how to fix them. I do not know that I have the expertise to solve that. What I am trying to do is better understand the problem.

For example, I am working on a study that uses a large database of newspaper closures over time and looks at possible effects on turnout, voter confidence, and related outcomes. That is a way to test, empirically, something rural election officials keep telling me: that losing local information infrastructure matters.

But rolling out a major communications platform that reaches everyone across states and jurisdictions is not easy. Staffing is not easy either. You cannot simply move people into these places and tell them to do what is essentially volunteer election work. If current trends continue, these problems are likely to get worse. The first step is understanding what the trends really are and what we can say with confidence, as opposed to what we hear anecdotally when we are out talking with people. The longer-term challenge is getting the right people together to think seriously about how to address them.

Last question: If you weren’t studying elections, what would you be doing?

If I were still a political scientist, I would probably be working primarily on political methodology — how we estimate models of politics, what tools are available to us, how we can improve them, and how we can make interpretation better.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make those tools more accessible to researchers. There is often a disconnect between theoretical ideas and what people can actually put into practice. Whether I would still be doing work in Africa is a different question. That kind of work becomes harder when you get married, have a family, and end up in a job that requires you to be in one place every day.

But if I were not a political scientist at all, I think I would almost certainly be doing something related to agriculture.