In all, more than 8,000 local officials oversee US elections, according to the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. There’s no central tally of departures, but researchers see warning signs.

Nearly 35% of local election officials, for instance, report they are eligible to retire before the next presidential election in 2024, according to a survey conducted in 2020 by the center at Reed College and The Democracy Fund.

In the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, at least a third of election directors have resigned since fall 2019, said Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania…

“Everything I’ve heard from state officials and from locals is how unbelievably stressful it is, that they just can’t take it anymore,” said Paul Gronke, who teaches political science at Reed and founded the voting information center.

“We’re in danger of losing a generation’s worth of professional election expertise,” added David Becker, who runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research that works with election administrators. “That would be bad enough if it weren’t also combined with the fact that they might be replaced with partisan hackery.”