This Arizona Program Is Attracting New Election Workers

Since 2020, every county in Arizona has lost at least one of its senior election administrators.

Responsibility for elections in the state falls to the county recorder and an election director; its turnover in chief election officials has been the highest among western states.

Retirements have been a factor in this attrition, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes says, but so have threats and harassment. It’s a new landscape, with new challenges for officials. “We were trying to figure out how to get new recruits,” he says.

To that end, Arizona created a pilot program to recruit college students and recent graduates for fellowships in election administration. Operated out of the Office of the Secretary of State, the Fellows in Election Program ran from July to December 2024. Seventeen fellows were placed in nine county offices; all completed the program and so far, three have accepted jobs in election offices.

“What this program showed was that there are a lot of young people out there who are not only interested in the work, but have the resilience to be successful,” Fontes says.

Election officials tend to love their jobs, but it’s hard to understand the work or its rewards from the outside, says Rachel Orey, elections project director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which published a report on the program and its results.

The program tackled two challenges at once: It brought young people into election offices to meet critical staffing needs during the election season, and it also created a recruitment pipeline.

The training the fellows received addressed the potential for conflict as well as de-escalation techniques. “Every single one of them got through some major, major episode,” he says. “I’m very proud of them, and I’m proud of the program.”

Beyond Social Media

Carly Morrison started down her path to become election official during her last year of graduate school, when she happened to attend a campus event at the University of Arizona where Secretary Fontes was promoting the new fellowship.

Morrison had been thinking of a summer internship already and hoped to work in government after graduation. “The fellowship provided a really unique chance to get my foot in the door,” says Morrison, who is now the Pima County elections compliance officer. “I just absolutely fell in love with election administration.”

Constance Hargrove, elections director for Pima County, was happy just to have another warm body helping out, let alone a dedicated young person working toward master's of public administration and law degrees. Morrison’s skill set meshed well with the realities of the workplace.

Election administration is no longer just somebody's grandmother with a typewriter in the office, doing voter registration and maintaining voter rolls, Hargrove says. “Election administrators have to be IT experts, cybersecurity experts, … project managers — they need to be a lot of things that anyone who walked off the street and into the director’s role could not understand.”

Morrison agrees. She recalls working with Hargrove on a spreadsheet covering resource allocation at 126 vote centers in Pima County, down to the square footage of each and the number of booths that would fit. “It was just that 1,000 times over, all of these little things that add up to the big picture on Election Day,” she says.

Dana Lewis, who serves as recorder for Pinal County, was initially unsure about participating in the fellows program. “The concern was whether we were going to be able to be effective for the fellows,” she says.

When she met with her team, they liked the idea of allowing a young person to be integrated into election processes and learn how they really work. It was an opportunity to show a new side of elections to a generation that gets most of its political news from social media.

Lewis didn’t end up with a new employee, but she is reaching out to one of her two fellows to work as a temp during a special primary election.

Stepping Up

The fellows were each paid a stipend of $15,000, money that came in part from the state’s American Rescue Plan funds. Fontes wants to see another fellowship in 2026, again running from July to December, but it’s unclear whether there will be funding for it.

The report from the Bipartisan Policy Center recommends designating a program manager “to oversee fellow recruitment, coordinate with election offices, and manage training logistics.” This is also on hold pending funding.

“Most people looking at this would say it doesn’t make sense not to do it again,” Fontes says. “But at the same time, we are subject to the budgets that come out of the negotiations between the state Legislature and the governor’s office.”

Implementation of the program was explicitly bipartisan, led by the Democratic Assistant Secretary of State Keely Varvel and Republican Deputy Assistant for Voter Registration Tonia Tunnell. Applicants for the fellow positions weren’t asked about their political affiliation. “They wanted to be clear that you check your party at the door when you do election administration,” Orey says.

Post-program interviews reflected potential recruitment benefits beyond the elections sector. Participation in the fellowship program was associated with a general increase in interest in government work, not just election administration. The “control group” for this analysis was comprised of registered Arizona voters who shared demographic characteristics with the fellows. (See charts.)

Lewis and her county human resources department were impressed enough with outcomes from the fellowship to use it as a model for paid summer internships in county government for high school students.

“There was a palpable intentionality to these folks coming on board and coming to this work,” Fontes says. “It makes me that much more hopeful for the future when you've got young people who are willing to step into the void and take on these challenges with sort of the grit and determination that these young people have.”