Democracy on the Front Pages: Evaluating Local Media Coverage of Election Officials

Abstract

Following the 2020 election, there has been renewed scrutiny of election administration in the United States. Given that election officials typically operate behind the scenes, media coverage of them represents one of the few opportunities for voters to learn about who oversees elections in their states. Drawing on literature on media effects, public opinion, and election administration, I seek to evaluate the conditions under which state election officials receive news coverage. How frequently does the media consider election administrators to be “newsworthy,” and in what contexts are they covered? When problems arise in election administration, how are election officials portrayed, and what might voters learn about them? To answer these questions, I collect and analyze an original dataset of more than 1,100 newspaper articles mentioning the state-level chief election officials in 10 states across 4 election cycles (2016–2022). Using a novel codebook, I manually code my data across a range of criteria to evaluate the election officials’ newsworthiness (“newsworthiness index”) and the conditions under which they are covered. My results suggest that media coverage referencing election officials occasionally elevates them as highly newsworthy actors. In line with literature on negativity bias in the media, news coverage of election officials is dominated by articles reporting on problems in the electoral process. Moreover, when election officials make headlines, a greater share of that coverage is problem related than not. These results have implications for the information that voters may acquire about their election officials through the media. Despite having a relatively low profile, chief election officials who do find themselves in the media spotlight may discover that their salience to constituents is often in the context of a problem occurring in election administration.