OHIO — A bipartisan task force on the national level was recently formed to study and develop ways to prepare future election workers. This comes as many are leaving the profession at a record pace.

What You Need To Know

• The Election Workforce Advisory Council was formed to improve recruitment, retention and the training of election workers


• It’s made up of election officials, those in academia, industry and experts


• It typically takes four years to train an election workers so that they know how to handle local, gubernatorial and presidential races


• Experts say election officials are leaving at record rates

“Elections are becoming increasingly complex. It used to be a pretty simple task, really, when we voted on punch cards when we did a lot of things by paper, but more and more technology is being introduced into the election process,” executive director of the Ohio Association of Election Officials Aaron Ockerman said. “And that’s a good thing, but it does make it more challenging.”

Ockerman said that’s in addition to the fact that these days, election workers now face threats and skepticism about how they do their jobs. This is something he said makes the job tough, thereby prompting people to leave their jobs.

“[One of the goals is to] figure out why that’s happening,” he said. “And we need to try to turn that around and get young people involved and really get more people into the process that are qualified and are going to take care of our democracy for us.”

Ockerman made it clear that it takes a while to train election workers to conduct elections. That’s because the training process includes helping people to familiarize themselves with how to administer elections. It’s a process he said that requires people to do a variety of things, while being technologically even with social media.

“You have to know how to balance budgets,” he said. “Obviously, you have to be pretty good at math. So you’re counting people’s votes. There’s just many, many different requirements for folks that are administering elections these days.”

Those things, he said, are in addition to the stress that comes with the job. Ultimately, Ockerman said every state needs more people and better people that will stick around for a while.