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There is no national agency that runs American elections. There are more than 10,000 election jurisdictions — counties across most of the country, townships and cities in New England and parts of the Midwest — ranging from a few hundred registered voters to Los Angeles County's five-million-plus. Each has a chief local election official: a county clerk, registrar, auditor, or election director, sometimes elected, sometimes appointed, who owns everything from voter rolls and ballot layout to machine testing, poll-worker hiring, and the canvass.
The Bipartisan Policy Center's panel — the best census of the workforce — tracked 18,644 chief local election officials across 6,290 jurisdictions between 2000 and 2024. Beneath the chiefs sits a seasonal army: more than 770,000 poll workers staffed roughly 94,000 polling sites in 2024, most of them over 60. These are the people the rest of this page is about — the machinery they operate has its own Dot: How a Vote Is Counted.
EAC Election Administration and Voting Survey. 2016 (917,694) is the earliest cycle with a clean national total — earlier collections had whole non-reporting states. Midterm staffing is structurally smaller; the 2018/2022 dips are not attrition.
Election offices are funded like any other line in a county budget — and usually near the bottom of it. In the Brennan Center's 2026 survey, 80 percent of local officials said their annual budget needs to grow just to keep up with administration and security needs over the next five years, and more than one in five has already had a budget request denied. Asked where new money would go first, they answer wages, poll-worker hiring, and voting equipment — payroll, not gadgets.
Recruiting the seasonal workforce has actually eased since its 2016 low point — 65% of jurisdictions called it difficult in 2016, 54% of jurisdictions called it difficult in 2022, 48% of jurisdictions called it difficult in 2024 — but nearly half still struggle, the pipeline skews past retirement age (under 17 percent of 2024 poll workers were under 40), and 2025's federal election-security cuts landed with no replacement money: 75 percent of officials say no state or local resources have filled the gap.