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.

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.

They’ve been the best kind of conversations, where people share what they’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known sooner.

About two years ago, after the annual Election Science, Reform, and Administration Conference, we started calling a subset of these conversations Books & Ballots. The idea was simple: bring the research (“books”) into conversation with the real-world work of administering elections (“ballots”).

Now, as the series heads into its third year – in collaboration with partners at the Center for Election Innovation & Research and the MIT Election Data + Science Lab – this Substack is the new home for those conversations.

Here you’ll find recordings and takeaways from our webinars and workshops, along with practical insights drawn from both research and lived experience. We’ll continue to focus on ideas you can use in your own office, whether that’s improving hiring and training, planning budgets, or designing better processes.

My hope is that this space makes good thinking more accessible and a little less abstract.

I’m glad you’re here.