Election Fatigue and Burnout

by Christopher Wilson
Sept. 19th, 2006

 I’m constantly amazed now by the stories of how many election administrators are leaving the election business.  In the last few years since the passage of HAVA administrators have been leaving in droves.   The most common complaint seems to be that it is no longer interesting rewarding work.  Many feel that it is a thankless job.  You rarely get recognized for doing a good job; that is what is expected.  But you never live it down if you do a bad job or have issues in your office.

At the same time I’ve finally started to notice articles mentioning how some administrators are having chest pains during election night.  All of which has me thinking about this issue of fatigue.

 In most election offices on Election Day you typically arrive at work around 5AM.  You begin to tabulate votes after 7PM (give or take a bit for different states).  That means that when you start to tabulate votes you have already put in a 14 hour day—and much of it may already be fairly taxing.  Compare this to the problem in the medical field where young doctors often work very long shifts.  I’m not sure very many of us would be comfortable knowing that a doctor that has been up for 24 hours is about to perform surgery on us.  For many years, however, this was considered a right of passage.  The practice has now been called into question over the last few years.

The same holds true for election workers.  Working very long days is a right of passage.  However, it may be time to re-think the practice.  What happens to your tabulation process when your staff members are tired and starting to fade?  Well, in some cases they just get sloppy about their job.  Remember, when we are in the process of tabulating votes, close isn’t good enough.  We ask for, and often demand, perfection in counting.  In some cases, workers will start to cut corners or make poor decisions because of fatigue.

Think of the end of the evening when you have some data cartridges that cannot be read and you have to hand enter them from the paper tapes.  Here we are doing a manual data entry process that is error prone from the start.  Yes, you may work in teams of two where someone else watches the entering, but I can assure you that both of them are coming to the end of a long day and errors in hand entered numbers are likely to occur.  This is precisely the time when you want people to be fresh so that you end the night without issues or controversy.  If you pump out live data to the Internet and news media and a hand entry is widely off, it has a good chance of heading to the TV news that way. 

I would suggest here that you should consider some kind of change that allows your tabulation staff to arrive at work much later in the day.  If they also handle other tasks during the day, start thinking about cross training other staff members to handle those duties so your tabulation people can be fresh.  Work with your vendors and see if they can staff some people from 5am to around 2pm, and then bring in a fresh support person or staff around 5pm to midnight.  It’s not necessarily easy to make this happen, but it’s worth it in the long run.  Or you can continue to do things the way you always have, just because it’s the way you always have done it.  Then we can read about your office in the paper when someone screwed up because they were tired and stressed out. 

Times have changed in the election business and you should be thinking about improving your operations.  Doing things the way you did them 10 years ago won’t work in this environment.  Fatigue and stress doesn’t just apply to the top people in the office; it applies to everyone and you need to start to address the issue.