When the Gwinnett county board of elections held its monthly meeting on 20 November just outside of Atlanta, the county’s election director, Zach Manifold, noticed something was different.
For months leading up to the presidential election, there had been a steady stream of people who would come to speak at the board’s meetings, many of them concerned about the potential for fraud or wrongdoing. But this time around, weeks after Donald Trump’s victory both in Georgia and in the US presidential election, fewer than a half-dozen people signed up to speak during the public comment portion of the meeting.
“Everybody was very happy,” Manifold said. “I have not had anyone contact me with any questions really about the election.”
Until the 2020 election, local election officials worked in obscurity and anonymity, ensuring that the election was fairly administered and complied with state and federal laws. But ever since the president-elect’s loss in 2020, they have borne the brunt of his efforts to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections. They have faced vicious harassment campaigns, been bombarded with public records requests, and been on the frontlines combating misinformation about voting. A number left the profession altogether.
Many election officials had been preparing for an intense period of uncertainty after election day, concerned that, as in the 2020 election, the winner of the presidential election would be uncertain and they would face immense pressure as Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results. But when the race was called fairly quickly for Trump, the results were widely accepted, with few questions about who won.
“I think the age of election denialism is, for all intents and purposes, dead,” Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who is Arizona’s top election official, said when he certified his state’s election results in late November.
But in interviews, several local election officials said the story was more complex. While they hoped the uncontested outcome of the 2024 election would pave the way for a return to normalcy after four bruising years, they doubted it would end election denialism altogether.
“The temperature certainly needed to be brought down, and as a result of the election, the temperature seems to have frozen,” said Barb Byrum, a Democrat who oversees elections in Ingham county in Michigan.
“I don’t think it’s the end of election denialism, but the louder conspiracy believers, their candidate won,” Byrum said. “It has been evident that when that particular group, when their candidate is victorious, they’re quiet. But that does not mean that they won’t be louder for the next election.”
Eighty-eight per cent of voters say that the 2024 elections were administered well, a significant increase from 2020, when just 59% said so, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.
Among Trump supporters, that shift was even more pronounced. After the 2020 election, just 21% of Republican voters said they thought the election was well run and 79% said they did not. This November, 93% of Republican voters thought the election was run well. Only 7% said they did not.
Eighty-four per cent of Democrats said they thought the election was well-run, a 10-point drop from 2020, according to Pew.
Indeed, after election day, Byrum spent time pushing back on conspiracy theories from some Democrats. She said that the skepticism among Democrats wasn’t equivalent to the deep skepticism from Republicans since 2020. When she responded to concerns about this election, she said, Democrats were willing to accept her explanations.
Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the National Association of Election Officials, observed strains of election denial in places where there were particularly close contests. For example, in North Carolina, the state senate president, Phil Berger, a Republican, has suggested there was foul play in a state supreme court election.
Allison Riggs, a Democrat, trailed her Republican opponent by 10,000 votes on election night but pulled ahead and won the race by a few hundred votes. Berger called it “another episode of count until someone you want to win, wins”.
According to Patrick, “what this tells us is that it really has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the election. It has everything to do with whether or not a particular party or candidate has been victorious.”
Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College who leads a survey of local election officials across the country, said that many election officials “generally breathed a sigh of relief” when the election results were decisive.
Still, he said there was evidence of the toll that the pressure had taken on officials. At a recent conference on election administration hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC, he said, some election officials said 2020 and 2024 were “night and day”, while others broke into tears, underscoring the tension they had been experiencing.
“It is good that we do not have national figures constantly questioning the validity of the outcomes and calling into question the behaviors in individual jurisdictions,” he said. But officials must still navigate “the stress related with the jobs and hours that people are saying that they’re working”.
A survey of local election officials this year by the Elections & Voting Information Center, which Gronke leads, found that 14% of respondents said they had considered leaving their job because they were concerned about safety. And while over three-quarters of respondents said they were satisfied with their job, just 22% said they would recommend that their children go into election administration.
Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor in Bartow county, Georgia, said he wanted to spend the time outside of the main election season speaking to voters and educating them about the election process.
“I’m glad things are calming down,” he said. “But if we don’t keep folks engaged, we’re going to repeat.”
