Bob Bauer interviews Tammy Patrick, Chief Executive Officer for Programs at the Election Center and former Federal Compliance Officer for the Maricopa County Elections Department, about how election officials are preparing for the midterm elections. They discuss differences between an imperfect election and an illegitimate one, the decentralized patchwork of thousands of local offices that administers the vote, the checks set up to constrain partisan officials or rogue insiders, and why federal intervention now tops the list of concerns for many officials. Tammy closes with advice for voters: make a plan, vote early, and don’t mistake a slow count for a rigged one.
Mentioned:
The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (Presidential Commission on Election Administration, January 2014)
“Ballot Mail For Federal Elections,” final rule, 91 Fed. Reg. 54966 (United States Postal Service, August 21, 2026)
Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, Bolstering Funding and Practices for Resilient Elections: Sustainable Funding and Models of Success at the State and Local Level (June 2025)
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bob Bauer: Good morning. I’m pleased to have as our guest on Executive Functions today one of the nation’s true experts, very engaged with this year’s election but an expert on the American election system generally: Tammy Patrick, with whom I worked on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration from 2013 to 2014. She was a star member of our commission, and we got to know each other then.
She had been Federal Compliance Officer at the Maricopa County Elections Department for 11 years and has been involved in election administration since 2003. She is currently the Chief Executive Officer for Programs at the Election Center, the National Association of Election Officials, and she also has been teaching as an adjunct at the University of Minnesota.
Tammy Patrick: It’s exciting to see you again, Bob. I always love having our conversations.
It’s excellent. So let’s start, because you have such extensive involvement with election officials around the country, with the question: At this stage of the preparation for the election, what are you hearing generally from election officials across the country? What’s uppermost in their minds? What are their principal concerns? What level of confidence are they expressing in the quality of the preparation they’ve been able to undertake? Let’s begin there.
Excellent, and I really appreciate starting with our election professionals, because they truly are the experts in where we stand and how prepared we are for the next election and the ones after that, because our election procedures are iterative. We’re always striving to improve on this great experiment. So just recently, a couple of weeks ago, the Election Center, the National Association of Election Officials, had our annual conference in Kansas City, and everyone there was resilient and steadfast in their preparations for the upcoming midterms.
I think it’s important to realize that for every election, there’s going to be something that comes up, whether it’s a hurricane, a wildfire, litigation, last-minute legislation, some change in a rule, or a change in a polling location. There’s always something that election officials need to pivot and adjust to. So when we think about election administration, we think about having contingency plans, and it’s not always just having plan A, B, and C. Quite often, it’s D, E, F, and G as well.
And so in this moment, election officials are really breathing a huge sigh of relief about the Postal Service rule, but realizing that there are still some challenges with delivery and transportation routes. So they’re encouraging voters to still participate by mail or absentee if they choose to, but to take early action and get their ballots back early.
And they’re making sure also that we get back to the basics. Every election is so complex and detail-oriented, and the details matter. So they’re making sure that they’re getting back to basics, and that they’re ensuring that all of the boxes are checked, the t’s are all crossed, the i’s are all dotted, names are spelled correctly, no one’s left off the ballot. Those are the types of errors, human errors, that are going to happen, because it’s always something.
I often say that everything old is new again, but with a twist. So in this moment, we’re looking at how misinformation will be leveraged, how fear and chaos will be inserted into the procedures, and what election officials can do to make sure that voters still feel confident and are able to get out and exercise their very, very critical right.
And in this respect, can you say a little bit about something that gets confused in the public dialogue: the difference between an imperfect system, in the course of which errors may occur, and a system that somehow isn’t functioning to produce the real winner—that by error, or by rigging, or by some chain of events, somehow somebody emerges who didn’t in fact get the most votes. That’s a distinction that sometimes gets lost, and I’m sure election officials have to address that concern all the time.
That’s such an important distinction, because it is the case that if there were a mistake or an error that affected the outcome of an election, that election would be re-held. And we’ve seen that happen across history. But a small error might have an impact on the total number of ballots counted, or the total number of votes. As long as it’s not affecting the outcome of the election—and the goal is to make sure that our communities are able to select those who will represent them, as well as weigh in on certain questions of policy and practice—as long as that is not affected, then the system holds. The true reason for having an election has been successfully administered.
It’s when there are issues that might affect the actual outcome—and this is where we’ll talk a little bit about some of the checks and balances in a minute—that we have processes in every single state. If there are questions around the legitimacy of an election, and there is evidence (we have to have the evidence!) then any individual in most states has the opportunity to take those claims to court and have their day and their say on why they believe the election was in fact not legitimate.
So let’s return just very briefly to something you said, which I think is the foundation for an understanding of this process as a whole. You used the term “the complexity of the process.” I recently tried to pin something down. In fact, it was at your Election Center conference—not the last one, but the one before that, I believe, in Salt Lake City—where Ben Ginsberg and I spoke, and we asked any number of election officials: How many voting jurisdictions—separately administered voting jurisdictions—are there in the United States?
And we got multiple different answers and a good number of “I don’t knows.” It appears that number is somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000. So can you talk a little bit about the complexity as it relates to the decentralized character of our elections?
It’s important when we think about elections to realize that across the landscape of the country, it’s such a patchwork, and the question that we ask and the terms that we use are going to inform what the answer is. So for instance, what a local election official is called varies all across the country. They might be a clerk, an auditor, a supervisor, a recorder, a registrar, a probate judge. There are all of these different terms. What do we call a ballot that’s cast before Election Day? It might be in-person absentee, it might be early voting, it might be vote by mail. There are all of these different phrases, and sometimes they mean different things from one state to the next.
And so when we look across the country, it’s important to know that our U.S. Constitution says that the states are responsible for the time and place of our elections, and how each state has decided to dole out—to share—those responsibilities is really up to the state’s constitution and its statutes. So in some places, it is the chief election official at the state level—the secretary of state, lieutenant governor, state board—that’s tasked with many of the administrative duties of conducting the election. But for the vast majority of our states and our commonwealths, it’s actually at the local level.
The reason we don’t have a specific number is that in some cases—in New England, in Michigan, and in Wisconsin—they conduct their elections at the hyper-localized level, at the municipal level or the township level, and they can have hundreds of election offices in one state alone. I think in Michigan and Wisconsin, it’s something like 1,831 in one state and 1,553 in another. And it changes, because annexations and consolidations and all of these localized government pieces can change even the number of election offices we have.
That’s why, when we think about all of those election offices across the country, it’s important to note—and these are a couple of my favorite data points, by the way—that 34% of our election offices don’t have a full-time employee. That’s because 75% of our local election offices, those small rural locations, serve only 8% of the country’s electorate. And thankfully the numbers are exactly the opposite on the other side of the spectrum: 8% of our election offices, our largest urban jurisdictions, serve 75% of the nation’s voters. So we have a situation where large jurisdictions often have hundreds of employees and small jurisdictions don’t have a single person designated to full-time work.
The one thing that they all kind of share, however—I did a report last year with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and the Robert J. Dole Institute, Bolstering Funding and Practices for Resilient Elections, and it was interesting to learn—is that all across the country, no matter what size the office is, they’re under-resourced. Most often, our election offices’ budgets are a fraction. In fact, there’s an Auburn study in that report that noted that the average election office budget among those surveyed was one-half of one percent of the county’s entire budget. So even if you doubled the elections department budgets in those counties—and this was the average—it would only be 1% of the county’s entire budget, because there’s tension at the local level. You’ve got law enforcement, health concerns, public safety—all of these things that are in competition with one another for resources.
And unfortunately, oftentimes people think that elections only happen every two years, or even sadder, only every four years, but that’s just not true. It’s an ongoing effort to make sure that our voter rolls are maintained. Every day people turn 18, they get married, they change names, and we have a highly mobile population. So we have to make sure that our election officials are provided the resources and the tools to best serve their communities.
That’s very helpful. Another noted feature of our system of administration in the United States is the role of officials who are elected to the office on ballots on which they affiliate with particular political parties. And so people ask the question: Well, doesn’t that mean you have political control of the elections, and what does that mean for the outcome? I recall that the Presidential Commission on Election Administration said specifically that may be the case, but the administration of elections is a facet of public administration that needs to take place—and around the country does take place—on an impartial, professionalized basis. Tammy, can you comment on that?
So half of our local election officials are themselves elected. The remaining half are either appointed politically or hired as public servants under government merit rules, that sort of thing. One thread runs through all of those types of hiring and staffing of our election official positions: No matter how you get to that office or that role, once in that role, it is imperative that you serve the entire community of voters you’re responsible for.
I had the great fortune of serving under Helen Purcell, the county recorder, during my time in Maricopa County. Everyone there—the entire office, dozens of people—was of varying political parties: Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Green Party, unaffiliated. That’s the important part of our patchwork of administration: There are checks and balances from having individuals of all political affiliations present, whether they are doing the tasks at hand of administering the election or being there as an observer, as you mentioned.
That transparency and oversight and checks and balances happen laterally—at the polling place, you have poll workers of different political parties, you have observers of different political parties—and they also happen vertically. That is, you have individuals with oversight over the county. The state oversees and checks, so that if there’s a rogue election official who allows unauthorized individuals access to the systems, that person is held accountable and perhaps tried for felony criminal activity. Or if you have, for instance, county boards that say they’re not going to certify the outcome of an election because they just don’t believe that it’s true, or they believe in their “gut” or their “heart” (and these are in quotes here) that the outcome is not correct, even if it has been audited and recounted and hand-counted, that’s where it’s important to have those checks and balances, to make sure that there’s a backstop in the courts and that we have legitimacy across the board.
So it doesn’t matter as much to me whether the person got to that office by being elected or appointed or hired. The most important thing is: Are they there to uphold the oath that they take, and are they there to ensure that eligible voters have unimpeded access and that only eligible voters are able to participate?
And I will say that when I started in this work 23 years ago now, back in 2003, there were concerns about insider threats—what happens if there are individuals trying to have an outsized influence on the outcome of the election—and there was a lot of pushback for a very long time, because we had no examples of that actually manifesting. But unfortunately, in this moment, we do have examples of just that very thing. And so in this moment, our institution is really being tested to make sure that the infrastructure we have in place to protect against these types of intrusions or vulnerabilities is in fact holding. Have we inoculated the system sufficiently? If there is a single individual or a couple of individuals, will the checks and balances make sure that they don’t have that outsized influence on the final outcome of an election? Time and again in the last few years, we have seen that yes, the system is holding and identifying these individuals and making sure that they don’t have that outsized influence. So I’m hopeful that for the November election, we continue to see our institutions hold in that way.
Let’s talk about another potential source of influence that’s very much on people’s minds: the role that the federal government has either sought to play, or announced that it may wish to play, in the administration of elections—setting rules and using law enforcement authority to influence how rules are shaped as well as how they’re enforced. What are you hearing from election officials about their concerns about this fairly dramatic shift in the conditions under which they operate? How do you see this affecting the way election officials think about this year’s elections and what they need to do to prepare successfully for them?
So I’ve been at the Election Center now—this is going on my fourth year, I guess—and at every one of our events, I tend to ask them, “What’s keeping you up at night?” That’s a question we all love to ask each other. And in the last year, the number one topic on the word cloud has been federal intervention. So this is very much on the minds of state and local election officials, and it’s playing out in a couple of ways.
One, they’re concerned about any sort of individuals being at the polling place and whether that would be seen as obstructing or suppressing turnout. They’re concerned about the withdrawal of some of the federal support we had previously from Homeland Security and from CISA. There were all sorts of tabletop exercises conducted up until last year, and all of that has stopped. They’re concerned about the requests from the Department of Justice for voter rolls and voter materials, and the confiscation of voter materials. That has never happened in the United States previously in this way.
And I will say that we’ve seen a new twist in the last week. There’s a news release that comes out called electionline.org, and there was a report on Monday that the Department of Justice had issued an email or a memo regarding a couple of counties in Georgia that were producing materials in a language other than English—which of course is required under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act when you have a certain population of individuals who have limited English proficiency. The fact that we have election offices providing materials to American citizens so that they understand the process is now somehow something that our Department of Justice sees as needing investigation, that to me is deeply troubling.
So this new role of the federal government is something that election officials are definitely concerned about, regardless of their own political party affiliation, because our Constitution is really clear that it’s up to the states, and the states decide how much of that responsibility is shared with local government in conducting our elections. They’re making sure that they have spoken with their counsel, whether it’s the state attorney general or their county attorney or the city attorney: If someone shows up and says they are a member of a federal agency and that they have authority to take our voting equipment or access the ballots, or whatever the claim is, how do we know if it’s true, what do we do to respond, and who should we notify?
So this is the type of preparation that we’re at in the United States of America. And I will say, for individuals who have observed elections internationally for years, this is the sort of behavior that gave them concern in other countries, and I don’t think anyone ever thought we would have to contemplate it in the United States, and yet that’s where we’re at. So I think it’s really important that the general public is aware that in their local office, in their state office, and in state and local offices all across the country, there are election professionals who are resilient and steadfast in making sure that their laws are upheld and that the rights of voters to participate will be taken care of.
Yes. By the way, it’s also worth noting, and no doubt this has registered with the election official community, that the courts have provided significant protection against federal government overreach. The voter roll cases, for example: The struggle over control of voter rolls, which is a state responsibility, has been adjudicated decisively in favor of the states. The federal government has lost some 24 consecutive lawsuits [26 as of Oct. 1] on the voter roll front. Obviously, as you pointed out earlier, the federal government was prevented from instituting a postal rule that would have had an effect, a potentially dramatic effect, on the transmission of election mail in this election, and there are other examples I could give.
I’m assuming—but tell me if I’m wrong—that the role of the courts so far has probably instilled some confidence within the election administration community: that, as painful as this experience may be, there are remedies they can look to that have proven to be effective in our judicial system.
Yeah, election officials are prepared to conduct the election under the laws of their state and the rules of engagement they have been given. They’re not usually the sort of individuals looking to influence those rules or change those rules. They are truly the referees. In this moment, I think they are thankful that when a challenge has been taken up to the booth or to the courts to check and verify whether something was legitimate, the rulings have held—that our traditional, historical balance of powers has held. I think we’re hoping for that to continue.
I was asked a question recently in another context, and we can close on this point; this has been extraordinarily informative and helpful. I was asked: If you had one thing, one statement to make to the voters at this stage in the preparation for the election, looking ahead to the voting in November, what would you say? You have one piece of wisdom you want to impart, one piece of information you want to leave with them in advance of the election. What would that be?
I love that question, because I think it’s important for voters to realize that our ability to participate is our superpower. It’s the great equalizer. It’s something that we all have as soon as we become eligible, and we are all equal in our ability to have our voice and our say in our government and our policies.
So I think in this moment—when we know there are challenges, there are those who are seeking to sow chaos, there are still foreign adversaries who want to amplify messages of confusion—we should take a moment and take a deep breath. The election has already started. So figure out your plan, the same way we did in a global pandemic and the way we should for every election. What is your plan to vote? What are your options? Have those options changed? Because they may have changed for a wide variety of reasons.
And take early action. If you want to participate in this election—and I hope that everyone does, because yet again it’s another important election—it’s important that you take early action. That way, if a challenge or a problem or an issue arises—if your voter registration isn’t current, or the ballot doesn’t get to you in the mail as early as you had wanted—you have plenty of time to recover. If, however, you wait till the deadline for everything—if you wait to mail back your ballot, or you wait to drop it in a drop box, or you wait to go vote until the last hour the polls are open—you’re limiting your chances to recover if there are any issues. So take early action. Make sure that you wear your cape, because voting, as I said, is your superpower. And hopefully we have really high turnout and wide margins, because that’s the other piece in this election.
The last thing I want to end with is that we may not know some of the projected winners on election night, because we never have official winners on election night. There isn’t a single state that announces winners officially on election night. Those are the press projections. When the press projects the winners, that’s because there’s a wide enough margin of victory and they’re comfortable doing so. We’re going to have a lot of close races, so we may not have projected winners until we have the official winners, and official winners might not come for days or even a few weeks. That’s normal, because after the election we have audits, we have ballot curing, we have ballots still coming in from military and overseas voters that were postmarked before Election Day. So that’s all normal. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s delayed or it’s slow or that there’s some sort of rigging happening. If you have questions, get involved and reach out to your state and local officials.
Tammy, thank you so much. You’ve been at this for so many years, so successfully, and with a reputation across the political divide for integrity and professionalism. So thank you for all you do, and thank you for what you’ll continue to do from now until Election Day and beyond. I really enjoyed having you with us today.
Thanks, Bob. It’s so great to see you.
