A deficit of experienced voting officials could mean trouble for Pa.’s 2024 election

High turnover risks an increase in mistakes

Some departures, like Feaser’s, were retirements. But regardless of their reason for leaving, data and case studies bear out the intuitive notion that the less experience a county has in its election office, the more errors are likely to occur.

Errors such as instructing voters to vote for the wrong number of candidates, candidates or races being left off the ballot, or improper ballot return instructions have been increasing since 2019.

Four of the five counties with the most ballot and administrative errors since 2019 — as identified through research by Votebeat, Spotlight PA, and the Open Source Election Technology Institute — also were among the counties with the highest turnover.

County and state election officials agreed this past fall that the sharp increase in ballot errors seen in 2023 was due to election official turnover.

And in Luzerne County, where a ballot paper shortage in the 2022 midterm elections prompted outcry from residents and national scrutiny, an investigation by the district attorney determined turnover and the staff’s inexperience were at the heart of the issue.

Luzerne’s most recent director, Eryn Harvey, who returned to the director position in 2023 after that debacle, is departing, leaving the office again with an acting director as it heads into the primary.

“If you’ve never worked in an election, it is difficult to come in that office,” Feaser said.

Feaser’s replacement, deputy Chris Spackman, had the benefit of working closely with Feaser over the past two years, knowing he would be the director when Feaser retired. Other counties are adopting this peer-mentoring strategy as well.

In Snyder County, the former long-time director Patricia Nace has been brought back in a consultant role to help advise Devin Rhoads, the new election director who began in May. Rhoads said she has helped fill in gaps in his knowledge.

When Rhoads first began, there was a lot to learn, and the information coming from the Department of State wasn’t always clear because it contained abbreviations that new directors might not understand.

“Sometimes I wish it would be more like a cookbook,” he said. “So that’s one of the hardest things is we’re just new to this and we don’t know what all these abbreviations and things mean.”

But, since May, things have improved. The Department of State is also tapping into the hands-on experience of election administrators to provide support. It recently hired Dori Sawyer, an election director with roughly two and a half years of experience from Montgomery County, to lead training for new directors.

“I think they finally realized, ‘Oh my, we have all these new people and they don’t know what to do,’” Rhoads said. He recently joined the state’s trainings on its voter roll management system and mail ballot applications.

Schmidt said the department established its training unit to help with transferring institutional knowledge, and it hired a former election director because they wanted someone “who’s been in the trenches” that “can speak from experience.”

In addition to the training unit, the department has created a calendar for directors that identifies pre- and post-election duties and deadlines for 2024, released a new version of its ballot review checklist for counties to use as a resource, and bolstered its county liaison program, among other initiatives.

Schmidt said in his experience he has found that directors are invested in running elections right in all counties because they understand that errors will give “bad actors” something to take advantage of. Schmidt, a Republican, was a city commissioner in Philadelphia during the 2020 election, and achieved national prominence for pushing back against Trump’s claims of fraud.

Still, there is room for improvement. Boockvar, who now runs a consultancy on election security, said the legislature should act to provide more resources for training and provide better standards for universal practices like poll worker training and pre-election equipment testing.