High turnover among NC elections directors linked to 25-year-old ‘vague’ statute

North Carolina is grappling with increased turnover among county-level elections directors , which threatens to undermine the management of elections by those with knowledge and experience.

Elections have been deemed as critical infrastructure in the United States and turnover among election officials can affect how the elections process is conducted. The situation creates cause for concern in North Carolina, with 61 changes to county elections directors in the past five years.

A Carolina Public Press investigation has found a clear trend of lower-paying counties correlating with lower tenure for county elections directors and higher-paying counties with higher tenure.

But simply paying election directors more isn’t necessarily easy for many North Carolina counties, due to the way these positions are funded, pay decisions are made and different levels of resources for North Carolina counties.

This article is the second in the three-part CPP investigative series Elections Brain Drain and examines the underlying systemic issues that contribute to pay disparity and high turnover.

The first article examined the data pointing to correlation between pay and tenure, as well as concerns about the ongoing loss of highly experienced county elections directors. The third article will examine potential answers to these concerns.

Pay disparity is not the only factor affecting how long elections directors stay on the job. Demanding working conditions and increased responsibilities, increased scrutiny and threats to safety or incidents of harassment also play a role.

But as with pay, systemic factors in how elections offices are governed and funded may be enabling some of these problems to persist.

The situation in North Carolina is similar to that in some other states, a few of which are in danger of their entire elections apparatus shutting down.

While North Carolina doesn’t yet appear to be near this tipping point, the state may face urgency in finding opportunities to understand what is happening and preventing it from worsening to the point that it weakens the ability of counties to run elections properly.

Hyperlocal decisions on pay

The funding of elections are “hyperlocal functions,” said Mitchell Brown , a political scientist at Auburn University and a founding editor of the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice.

“If you have a poor county, there’s less revenue available to pay the person,” she said.

To understand the pay disparity for elections directors in North Carolina, CPP issued a public records request to all 100 counties over a two-month period this spring, receiving responses from 68 of them. The investigation found a wide pay range across the state.

Of the counties that responded, the highest-paying was Wake County at $197,852 for its elections director, followed by Mecklenburg at $179,939 and Forsyth at $136,387. These are among the largest counties in the state, each with large tax bases and hundreds of thousands of residents.

But some smaller counties also ranked high for pay level, including Chatham County, with a population of just over 81,000 paying $95,000, eighth among those that responded, and Polk County with about 20,000 residents paying $94,105, 10th of those that responded.

The lowest-paying county was Hyde, with an hourly rate of $19.28 per hour and no guaranteed number of hours. Hyde was one of 11 responding counties paying elections directors $50,000 annually or less, including Graham, Madison, Perquimans, Chowan, Washington, Vance, Alleghany, Anson, Greene, Swain and Richmond counties.

Each of these counties is small, with less than 45,000 residents, and several of them are in areas with economic challenges and chronically high unemployment.

While the North Carolina Board of Elections has expressed concern about high turnover for elections directors, it doesn’t track pay data itself, according to public information director, Patrick Gannon .

“We don’t control pay from the state level and our research into this issue is rather limited,” said Karen Brinson Bell , the executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections.

In North Carolina, each county’s board of elections makes recommendations for director pay, but ultimately county commissioners make the final decision in accordance with state law .

According to the law, the salary that commissioners approve must be comparable to the salary in counties that are alike in size, population and the number of registered voters, according to the statute, and must be at least $12 per hour including benefits.

The portion of the statute setting the minimum level at $12 an hour was last changed in 1999, 25 years ago. The statute also doesn’t address how “comparable” the salaries are allowed to be to counties of what degree of similarity.

Sara Lavere , the president of the North Carolina Association of Directors of Elections and elections director in Brunswick County, said she finds the statute “pretty vague.” It “doesn’t provide a lot of guidance,” she said.

Setting the salary in relation to a comparable county also isn’t necessarily adequate, Lavere said.

“How many towns does that county administer elections for?” she said. “There’s a lot to consider when you look at the complexity of each county’s election administration.”

Although the salary comes from the budget that county commissioners set, there needs to be buy-in from the General Assembly to see how important the role of the election administrator is, she added. Election directors need to be paid more, according to her.

At the state elections board, Brinson Bell agrees that higher county elections director pay is needed.

“We can all recognize that $12 an hour is a very antiquated part of the law for, if not all, the vast majority of our state,” Brinson Bell said. “$12 is not even a living wage.”

Regardless of the size of a county, every single county director and staff have the same responsibilities, she said.

“When we’re in the smaller counties, one elections director is often having to be the one who does all the work, versus a larger county,” Brinson Bell said. “Larger counties have larger staff who carry out the processes instead of one or two individuals like we see in the smaller counties.”

The current law is not written to today’s standard, according to Brinson Bell. “It’s an antiquated law that needs to be updated,” she said.

Limited guidance from courts

Limited clarification on the statute has come from a 10-year-old court decision.

“A court case in the past has kind of drilled down on some of those things you should look at when determining pay,” said Lavere, referring to Gilbert v. Guilford County in 2014.

In 2013, George Gilbert , who served as the elections director from 1988 to 2013, filed a lawsuit against the county after retiring. Gilbert claimed the county violated his employment contract because his pay was not in compliance with the statutory requirements and he hadn’t been adequately compensated since 2007.

Gilbert’s salary was not on par with what directors were being paid in counties comparable in size, population and how they were situated, he claimed. He also presented evidence that, based on his performance and the statements of the executive director of the state board at the time, he was considered the best county director statewide.

Gilbert argued that Guilford County was similar to Wake and Mecklenburg counties in populace, staff size, precincts and the number of early voters.

The trial court ruled in his favor, giving him back pay of $38,503 with interest for 2010 to 2012.

The county appealed the trial court’s decision, arguing that the statute gave power to the board of county commissioners to set election directors’ pay to the $12 per hour minimum and that they had paid Gilbert well above this requirement. The Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s judgment awarding back pay to Gilbert.

The decision offered more guidance in how county elections directors should be paid.

It specified that the a county board must consider the following things when deciding on a salary: percent of registered population, transience of population, strength of political parties and level of discord between them, electoral districts for state, county and municipal offices, comparable sophistication of population politically and the experience and skills of the individual in the role.

But, other than every elections director unhappy with existing pay suing their county commissioners, the state lacks any mechanism to enforce that court precedent and it seems apparent from the wide pay disparity, even among counties that appear similar, that many counties have not considered it when setting pay.

Why elections director turnover is a problem

Turnover among elections directors also leads to the loss of institutional knowledge, something Brinson Bell is concerned about, especially heading into a presidential election.

The upcoming election will be “the largest most complex election that any election administrator will face,” she said. “But many of them have expressed that the fuel is just not in the fuel tank.”

This year alone, 10 changes to elections directors in North Carolina have taken place. One county elections director vacancy has yet to be filled in Wilson County, just months before the November elections, with another potential vacancy in Dare County once its director retires next month.

Some new directors will be handling their first presidential election as county elections director.

“Elections are the bedrock of American democracy,” said Brown, the Auburn political scientist. “The administrative infrastructure that undergirds makes democracy possible.”

An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 individuals nationwide work full-time as elections staff, according to a survey conducted by the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College.

More than half of the elections offices in the U.S. have none or one full-time employee working there. Meanwhile, 32% of all jurisdictions in the country have no full-time elections staff, much like Hyde County in North Carolina, where even the director is part time.

Steadily increasing turnover among elections staff, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center, reduces the experience level of officials, “potentially affecting institutional knowledge and effectiveness.”

It also poses challenges for democracy, according to Tammy Patrick , the chief executive officer for programs of The Election Center at the National Association of Election Administrators.

When seasoned professionals leave and take institutional knowledge with them, it can be challenging because elections are really complex and governed by federal law, state law and county policies, Patrick said.

Hiring and retaining qualified individuals to fill the vacancies may also pose a challenge, she added.

“It’s difficult sometimes to recruit the right people with the correct motivations, because that’s one of the other challenges in this moment is that when people leave the field, you also have a vacuum now that’s being filled,” Patrick said.

“You want to make sure that those individuals stepping into that role have the proper motivations and they’re not trying to take on that role or obtain that role in order to have an outsized influence on the election itself.”

Systemic changes add to job’s complexity

Most experts and elections directors whom CPP interviewed said the role of an elections director and the elections workforce at large has become more complex as elections have become more sophisticated over time – a contributing factor to the increasing turnover.

Some directors say their role became more demanding with added responsibilities since the 2020 elections and the ‘big lie,’ when false claims that elections were fraudulent arose, along with attempts to overturn results.

While the responsibilities have increased in recent years under high scrutiny and with the passage of new voting laws in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, the role of elections officials has actually been evolving as far back as the 1990s, according to Brown.

“Some of this has to do with the highly contentious space that elections officials are working in and the pressures that are put on them,” Brown said. “Then you overlay that with how the work itself is changing and the demands of the work changing.”

In 1993, the National Voter Registration Act established federal requirements to register voters and maintain accurate records of voter registration, increasing the responsibilities. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act , or HAVA, radically reformed the voting process.

HAVA was passed, partly in response to what happened during the 2000 U.S. presidential election in Florida, when thousands of ballots weren’t counted due to problems with how they were marked and difficulty telling what voters had intended.

Among the many changes this law implemented, it required states to submit plans to describe how funding would be used for elections in order to be eligible for federal funding.

It also mandated accessible polling places, replaced the punch card and lever-based systems in some states with electronic voting machines, computerized voter registration, required voter identification for first-time voters, required eligible voters to have the option for provisional ballots and created the federal Election Assistance Commission as a resource for election administration.

In addition to these laws, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act of 2009, implemented a requirement to distribute ballots to qualifying voters at least 45 days prior to election day.

“The National Voter Registration Act and HAVA put another set of requirements on the job and gave states more authority,” Brown said.

“We’re now in this environment where there’s a lot of political pressure on top of financial pressure and a great deal of media scrutiny,” she said.

Since the 2000s, technological changes to the elections process and the passage of a series of voting and elections laws in states across the country to prevent voter fraud and address election integrity, have added further responsibilities to elections officials administering the process.

All of these pressures of increased job duties, despite no change in the statute setting pay for directors in North Carolina, may be driving turnover here.

States passed “an unprecedented number” of voting laws in 2023 that will be in effect during the 2024 general elections, according to the Brennan Center for Justice .

“It’s been a slow evolution to make these jobs more complicated, and then in 2016 with foreign interference in our elections and in 2020 with a lot of pressure from domestic groups with fears about what’s going on with integrity and real attacks on offices through FOIA claims,” Brown said.

Turnover a national predicament

Underfunding of elections offices and turnover among elections directors is an issue affecting election administration across the country.

Nationwide, 39% of local election officials left their jobs between 2018 to 2022, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The high turnover among county elections directors in North Carolina is emblematic of a larger predicament plaguing election offices nationwide as elections become more complicated and sophisticated.

Turnover among election officials has increased over the last two decades and has spiked most in the past couple of years, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The U.S. is currently at “a critical inflection point for the election workforce,” the report reads.

“In 20 years of doing this work, I’ve never seen this before where there’s at least a dozen or close to a dozen examples across the country that have entire offices walking out because they can’t tolerate it anymore,” Patrick said. “That’s deeply troubling.”

In some states, more than half of local election officials have left their roles since 2020 , according to a report from advocacy group Issue One. The election officials that left their roles since 2020 took with them more than 1,800 years of combined institutional knowledge. Issue One argues that Congress can “remedy this crisis by providing more funding.”

Barring that happening, finding solutions is up to state and local governments.

“We’ve created this really sophisticated system and we’re not financially supporting it as well as we need to,” Brown said.

“We’re bringing in outside groups that are putting a lot of pressure on the system, whether they’re foreign adversaries, or they’re actually domestic groups who are determined that there’s something wrong going on, even … in the face of evidence that we’re seeing good, neutral administration of elections.”

To assist new elections officials and directors into their new roles, the Issue One report suggests more funding will be needed to invest in the training of new staff to learn complex election administration procedures and technical skills.

Turnover is expensive — costing taxpayer money to search for, hire and train new staff — according to current and former election officials who spoke to Issue One. In South Carolina , for example, the state election commission requested $3.2 million for training and technical assistance.

“These turnover rates signify a crisis in our democracy,” said Nick Penniman , Issue One’s founder and chief executive officer.