Examining Partisan Preferences for Election Directors’ Salaries in North Carolina from 2006 to 2021

Abstract

Election workers are crucial to the question of democratic representation in their role of managing effective and fair elections. In this article, we examine whether the partisanship of a county commission and the community play a role in election director salaries. We draw from our data collected from the North Carolina County Salary Survey reports from 2006 to 2021 to study this issue. We find that the county commission partisanship in North Carolina interacts with community partisan votes to affect election director salaries. Counties with Republican-controlled-County commissions and higher Republican vote share are associated with higher election director salaries. The models also show that non-Republican commissions pay less for election directors as the share of the Republican vote increases. This interactive effect for election directors is different from prior research on aggregate spending, which theorized an electoral advantage from marginal voters turning out. However, election administrators see higher salaries in jurisdictions where the county commission shares higher partisanship with the community, which may signal county commission recognition of partisan electoral advantage. These findings support theories of partisan electoral advantage. As election workers are leaving the profession because of increased workloads and threats to their security, we need to better understand how these salary decisions are made to keep these frontline workers in place for democracy, regardless of local politics.