Election workers are exhausted, abused and ready for their moment

RENO, Nev. - Andrew McDonald joined the staff of the Washoe County Registrar of Voters five months ago not fully realizing what he had gotten himself into.

Since then, he has witnessed the county board’s refusal to certify primary election results, an attempted citizen’s arrest of a board member, a major error that sent 20,000 mail ballots to inactive voters and an announcement that his boss would be taking a leave of absence just weeks before the November election, leaving him temporarily in charge.

In a swing region of a swing state - Washoe is home to Reno, one of Nevada’s largest cities - McDonald is scrambling seven days a week, dealing with a daily flood of misinformation and baseless accusations of wrongdoing, trying to hold it all together for his staff.

Somehow, the 48-year-old thinks it’s working.

As the clock ticks to Election Day, election professionals are under historic strain to get everything right: to allow for transparency so suspicious members of the public can see how it all works; to count ballots with no mistakes; to protect the rights of legally registered voters while ensuring that no one who is ineligible gets to participate. It’s an all but impossible task, made all the harder by low pay and a steady stream of threats and harassment, mostly from supporters of former president Donald Trump who believe his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Turnover among election workers is at new highs, with the leadership of more than one-third of election offices changing in the past four years, according to research published this year by the Bipartisan Policy Center. In a survey by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, more than one-third of election officials reported threats or other forms of abuse on the job.

“Election workers have faced an unprecedented level of scrutiny, vitriol and attacks,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center. “They have responded admirably amid these challenges.”

Some are working day and night testing machines, processing mail-in ballots, running early-voting locations and answering questions from the public. Their No. 1 job, they say, is to protect the vote. Their No. 1 hope is that, whatever the outcome, the public will look back and trust that the 2024 election was free, fair and secure.

So far, their work appears to be paying off: At least 64 million Americans have cast ballots nationwide in early voting, with relatively few significant glitches.

“I feel very optimistic,” McDonald said during a recent interview at the government complex in Reno, which serves a county population of nearly 500,000 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range near the California line. “We have a great staff here.”

It was a Saturday, but the office was humming as at least two dozen staffers did the hard work of mid-October in an election year. Bowls of Halloween candy and flashing decorations created a festive mood, accentuated by the thwap-thwap of a giant ballot sorter doing trial runs in the next room.

The day had begun, as all have this month, including the weekends, with a stand-up staff meeting - an informal moment for encouragement and words of thanks for a team that McDonald acknowledges is greener than it should be. Not only is McDonald new to his job, so is the current No. 2 person. Together, they have overseen the implementation of a new statewide election management system as well as a new ballot sorter the size of a pickup truck.

“We’ve got all this new technology,” he said. “Staff here is literally two years or less on the job. Those are the things that keep me up at night.”

Some of the pressures on election offices have risen to the level of news headlines: Pro-Trump activists have baselessly accused election officials in North Carolina of using the destruction of Hurricane Helene to impose rules meant to steal the election on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris. At an early-voting site in San Antonio last week, a voter punched a poll worker who asked him to remove his MAGA hat. (Like most states, Texas prohibits election slogans inside voting places. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, called another voter a “patriot” for objecting to a similar rule in New Jersey.)

Other pressures are less visible. Nichole Stephey, the clerk in rural White Pine County, Nevada, population 10,000, said she will probably resign after this election cycle because the pressures of the job, after 14 years, have become too much. She regularly fields questions laced with unfounded suspicions from voters and elected officials. Her board of commissioners barred her from participating in a statewide contract for ballot paper because the members didn’t trust the officials overseeing it, even though going solo was more expensive. She hasn’t had a pay raise in 10 years, she said.

“This year has been so hard on all of us,” Stephey said. “Like impacting-our-health type hard.”

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D), who oversees the state’s elections, recently visited White Pine during a two-day tour aimed at shoring up morale at election offices. Starting in Las Vegas before dawn on a recent Saturday and ending in Reno the following afternoon, he stopped at three rural election offices along the state’s eastern border - in White Pine, Lincoln and Eureka counties. He fielded concerns, answered questions and offered support. Between the lines were gentle reminders to follow the law and to stand tall against misinformation.

The three counties Aguilar visited are deeply conservative, with between 78 percent and 88 percent of voters casting their ballots for Trump four years ago. All have residents, and in some cases elected officials, who falsely believe Joe Biden stole the election in 2020. The registrars in these communities have borne the brunt of such suspicions, with hostile questions and accusations of wrongdoing.

In White Pine, Stephey showed Aguilar the new county courthouse where early voting was underway - a vast security improvement over the prior facility. She also showed him the ramshackle storage building where election machines are kept, explaining that she has gotten the green light from the county to improve security with new doors and cameras.

Like most election administrators, Stephey said residents pepper her with questions and misinformation, but because it’s a small community, she tries to tackle their concerns one at a time.

“When someone says something like, ‘How are you going to verify that signature?’ - you know, I invite them to to take a look at the screen that I look at,” she said. “I show them exactly the elements of the signature that we match to make sure everything is good. And they always feel better if you just take time and listen to them, acknowledge their concerns and address them.”

In Lincoln, county clerk Lisa Lloyd showed Aguilar where she stores her election equipment - in the basement of the courthouse, in one of three decommissioned jail cells that she opened with an old-fashioned brass key. Lincoln County spreads across 10,000 square miles, and some voters in the farthest flung parts must drive more than 100 miles to vote if they prefer not to cast ballots by mail.

“Right now, you are caring for our democracy,” Aguilar told Lloyd.

At his third stop, in Eureka County, Aguilar checked in with clerk Kathy Bowling, who had just wrapped up the accuracy tests on her election equipment the day before. One of the community’s most vocal election skeptics had asked to sit in on the process, Bowling said. So was she persuaded that the system is secure?

“Well, it was her second time,” Bowling said. “And I haven’t heard any more from her.”

Back in Washoe, Aguilar said he is optimistic that the county commissioners will not repeat after the general election their effort over the summer to block certification of the primary results.

A local pro-Trump activist had requested and paid for recounts, one in a school board race and the other for a spot on the county commission, claiming the contests had been marred by fraud. The hand recounts altered the tallies in each race by a single vote, not enough to change the outcome. The activist insisted the results were tainted, and the three Republicans on the five-member commissioner declined to certify. One of those Republicans, however, quickly reversed herself after Aguilar’s office sued.

During its meetings, the commission regularly fields a barrage of election conspiracy theories. In September, a frequent speaker named Nicholas St. Jon became so agitated while trying to present data that he falsely claimed showed election machines switching votes that the meeting was paused and law enforcement was called. St. Jon called for a citizen’s arrest of the chairwoman.

That same month, the county announced that the interim registrar, Cari-Ann Burgess, would take a stress-related leave of absence. More recently, Burgess told the Associated Press that she was ordered to take the leave.

Even before she said that, McDonald steered clear of talking about Burgess’s departure, beyond to say that her situation, like his own, had been “a lot for anybody to handle.”