Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.

 

17 December 2014

Elections administrators should be hired for professional skills

Rep. Bryce Bennett (D-Missoula) has asked for a bill, LC0129, that allows counties to detach the administration of elections from the Clerk and Recorder and place it in a new elective office:

NEW SECTION. Section 1. Office of county election administrator — duties.

  1. A county may establish an office of county election administrator as a partisan or nonpartisan elected office, according to the county's adopted form of government, by passing a resolution by majority vote of the county’s governing body.

  2. The elected county election administrator shall perform all duties assigned by law to the county clerk that are related to elector petitions and election administration and all duties assigned by law to a county election administrator.

Calling this a bad idea is understatement. Elections administration should be a profession, not a political office. Elections administrators should be hired on the basis of skills pertinent to administering elections, not on the basis of being the better of the gladhanders on the ballot.

I strongly suspect that Forward Montana, an organization that tries to get young involved in politics, is behind LC0129. Back in May, when Missoula County considered making its elections administrator a full time position filled through the normal hiring process, Forward Montana’s executive director, Kayje Booker, objected:

Commissioners already have heard from detractors of the idea to create a staff position, and they likely will hear more at Wednesday’s hearing. Forward Montana CEO Kayje Booker said she would prefer to see a nonpartisan elected clerk and recorder instead, in part because an elected person is directly answerable to voters and – according to at least one study – higher turnout as well.

“I don’t like it,” Booker said of the proposal. “I think it’s important that that position is accountable to the voters.”

At my request, Booker sent me a copy of the study, Comparing Elected and Appointed Election Officials: The Impact of Selection Method on Policy Preferences and Administrative Outcomes. Published in 2010, it’s based on a survey of 1,200 elections officials in Wisconsin, in depth interviews with some of those officials, and data from the 2008 presidential election. It’s authors concluded:

The results indicate that elected officials are more in favor of policies that are thought to promote turnout than appointed officials, that their municipalities are associated with higher voter turnout, and that their municipalities have lower voter purge rates. We find lower turnout when an official’s partisanship differs from the partisanship of the electorate, but this effect obtains only for appointed officials. Overall, the results support the notion elected officials are more likely to express attitudes and generate outcomes that reflects their direct exposure to the policy preferences of voters, in contrast to the more insulated position of appointed officials.

After reading it several times, I concluded that the study was interesting, but based on just one state. Had other studies, I asked myself, arrived at similar conclusions? I could find no other studies, although some might exist. Moreover, the Wisconsin study didn’t compare elected elections administrators with appointed administrators with professional credentials in elections administration, which is what Missoula County was proposing.

County elections departments, almost always bureaus of the county clerk and recorder, are apprenticeship operations. Young women out of high school or college obtain entry level positions and work their way up the ladder. Eventually, when the clerk and recorder retires, or becomes politically weakened, one or more of the apprentices runs for the position. Most clerk and recorders in Montana are women, and so are most elections administrators (often the clerk and recorder and elections administrator are the same person). The same was true in Wisconsin:

Nearly all Wisconsin clerks are white (99.5%) and female (just 11.1% of appointed clerks and 15.3% of elected clerks are men). Elected clerks are somewhat less educated than appointed clerks (30.7% are high school graduates or less compared to 22.1%). Appointed clerks are much more likely to have full time positions rather than part time (71.2% versus 15.6%), more likely to serve as treasurer for their jurisdiction as well as duties as clerk (62.5% versus 9.3%), and less likely to hold another job (36.4% versus 64.9%).

Flathead Memo note. Wisconsin is 86.2 percent white, according to the 2010 Census.

So while Booker found the Wisconsin study convincing, I did not. The study compared apples, but Missoula was looking at oranges.

Proponents of elected elections administrators fear that unless the administrators are directly accountable to the electorate, they will commit mischief that disenfranchises voters. They are far less concerned with the competence of the administrators than with what keeping control of the administrators directly through the ballot box. And they seem oblivious to the mischief created by elected elections administrators in other parts of the country. Do they remember the butterfly ballot? Hanging chads? Lines at polls six hours long? No.

Elections administrators perform two tasks. They maintain a large and constantly changing database of registered voters, and they conduct most elections (school districts conduct their own elections, another bad system). Obviously, they must comply with complex laws and regulations, and possess management and public relations as well as technical skills. Missoula County prepared a three-page paper describing the job of an elections administrator, and providing the rationale for hiring the administrator.

The elections administrator is charged with following complex policy, protecting the rights of each elector, reflecting the values of his or her community, being a leader in delivering efficient and fair elections with integrity, and managing a tight budget with limited revenue. In addition, the elections administrator must be comfortable with increasingly complex technology and promoting access to the elections process for an electorate with varying degrees of technological proficiency.

Currently, the elections administrator is budgeted as a half time position for Missoula County within the elected position of Clerk and Recorder. Asking for leadership of the magnitude that elections requires from a half time position fails to meet and exceed the standards of the modern voter. Asking the elections administrator to be beholden to one political party over another, to run an election at arm’s length because he or she is on the ballot, and to master the broad scope and complexity of Federal and State laws while seeking continuous improvements in customer service as a half time position could leave the elections process vulnerable and voters waiting for help.

If Bennett succeeds in adding his bill to the Montana Codes Annotated, he will solve a problem that doesn’t exist by passing a law that works against competent elections administration. That would ill serve Montana.