Experts are sounding alarms just over a year out from November 2024 that the presidential election could suffer from chaos and confusion after high turnover of local election officials and workers in key states.
Threats and scrutiny often linked to false claims of voter fraud have contributed to a surge of local election officials leaving their posts in recent years. The exodus could mean understaffed and inexperienced teams are left to grapple with continued conspiracies and misinformation surrounding the election process in 2024, with some running a high-stakes presidential election for the first time.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said he’s “quite worried” about the attrition of election officials and workers nationwide but argued it’s “not surprising” given the threats and harassment lobbed at many in the jobs.
Full disclosure, my wife is an elected Precinct Committee Person or PCP.
She has a couple of jobs, #1 being as we’re a 100% vote by mail state, she calls people who haven’t submitted a ballot yet to remind them of deadlines for mailing.
The other thing she does, which I won’t let her do alone, is monitoring ballot drop off locations to make sure nobody is engaging in intimidation or vandalism.
But there aren’t anywhere near enough people like her.