Episode Transcript: Zach Mohr

Cold Open

Zach

One thing though is that I am not a political scientist. I have taken three or four classes in political science.

Mara

Apologies, apologies.

Zach

Most of them methods. And the reason that I say that is mostly to make it clear that I come at this from a very different angle than most political scientists. And I got tricked into doing this.

Mara

Understood. Thank you so much.   A fellow election scientist? Would that be a fair? Yes. Yes, fair enough.

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Introduction

Hello, hello, hello! Welcome to What Voting Means To Me. I am your host, Mara Suttmann-Lea.

I’m not going to lie, friends, I have been feeling a little run down- mentally speaking, physically speaking, too, I guess of course those things go hand in hand. I can’t pin point one thing (who can?) but suffice it to say, within the podcast of what this podcast is about, it’s hard to stay hopeful about the health and quality of democracy these days. So I just want to put that out there for anyone else feeling similarly. It can be maddening, at least for me when one holds such sincere beliefs—which I do—about the value of democratic governance—the role that it should play, in theory, in facilitating those most human experiences of authentic expression, agency, anger, and acceptance—and to feel like we just come up short over and over again.

So I guess I’m just weary, and sometimes it feels like I’m weary by design—pulled in a million different directions by institutions that don’t actually want me to have energy and to play a vibrant role in building a true system of democratic governance that actually facilitates wholeness and belonging.

Nevertheless, it’s episodes like this that give me more than a modicum of hope. And at the very least, as you’ll hear, I also get to nerd out about elections, and I really hope you will join me in an election nerd-fest as I talked to Zach Mohr, an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas about his own democracy biography.

So, spoiler alert, I love stories like Zach’s, whose work blends the seemingly disparate worlds of accounting and elections. So he spends his days digging through county, city, and township budgets trying to figure out just how much we spend on election administration in the United States.

And that seems like a simple question, right? Figuring out how much it costs to run an election in the United States?

Wrong.

Wrong.

Don’t forget that we are talking 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions…and that’s really where elections are run. Finding these data—and finding these data are vital, don’t get me wrong, it is vital for understanding how we can better support election data in the United States.  But finding these data is complex, labor intensive, and time consuming. But Zach and his amazing colleagues are on the job.

For Zach, voting reflects the work of the people who make democracy possible: local election officials and workers. He expresses such deep admiration for their efforts and sacrifices in this episode, and all of the work that they do in this still tenuous, threatening environment that they are working in.

So given that this is what voting means to Zach, it’s no surprise he is as passionate about understanding election budgeting—and how we can improve our models of election funding to best support the herculean efforts of election officials to safeguard American democracy, and to support amazing voter experiences.

So, if anything can give me hope in my exhausted state, it’s things like Zach and he and his colleagues’ work to collect and assess zany, patchwork maze of election administration budgets in the United States. Please don’t let that phrase bore you! Election administration budgets. The spending of democracy. It is so cool friends. It is so cool. And I really do hope you join me on this little data nerd fest we go on.

And this work gives me hope, because the work of democracy—and it is work worth doing—requires funding, ya’ll! As for today, though my weariness would suggest otherwise, we still have a Republic. But, as Zach, his colleagues, and election officials across the country might say, “A republic, yes…but only if we can afford it.”

Please enjoy, Zach Mohr.

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Episode

Mara

Welcome to What Voting Means to Me. I'm so happy to have you here, Zach. And we're gonna just go ahead and get started with that first question, which is what is your earliest memory of living in a democracy?

Zach

My earliest memory really is probably the 1996 Clinton versus... Oh my Lord, Dole.

Mara

I almost forgot too. 

Zach

Okay, yeah. So Clinton versus Dole race and that's a that's one that you know a lot of people are going to be hard pressed to remember because it was such a such a snoozer of an election. But Dole being from Kansas it was of interest. I was in high school at the time and so we were watching at the time. But I definitely remember, you know, talking about it in class and being very excited for it. And then election day comes in. It was just, oh god, crushed. Just like he would. He was from Kansas. He was going up against an incumbent president that hadn't done.

anything but good things. It's all about the economy, that sort of thing. So, Dole just was not going to be a good starter. So that was kind of disappointing.

But I was very excited about the next presidential race that I would get to vote in. It was Gore versus Bush. And, you know, in Kansas, it was…only going to go one way. Sure. Like there was, so I really didn't feel like my vote mattered. So my very first memories of elections were that my vote didn't matter. And so probably unlike most of your guests that really feel connected to elections and voting or have for a large portion of their life, really a large portion of my life felt like my vote didn't matter. So that's where I'm coming from..

Mara

So you talked about the context of living in a safe state, it's pretty clear which way, you know, the vote was going to go. Was there anything about the nature of the challenges that ensued that really stuck with you in terms of solidifying that idea, like, oh, my vote doesn't matter, or any other sort of trajectories that that experience put you on that you can remember?

Zach

You know, I've taught in a political science department at UNC Charlotte, and I would always tell them about my parents and how...we were never allowed to talk about politics at the dinner table. Interesting. Literally never allowed because split household. So the only time I do remember was the Clinton-Dole election. We did talk about it a little bit that night. And so, I was always interested in politics, but I knew it. I just kind of felt like it doesn't matter what I do.

And so I was gonna go into engineering. I really just was…I didn't really think maybe at the local level, maybe I would run for mayor one day or state office or something, but never national in any way.

Mara

So this is this always or often this question leads into, especially when I'm talking to folks who are adjacent to the world of politics and elections, a conversation about your life, career trajectory. The first thing I want to ask is…when you talk about this experience of feeling like your vote doesn't matter, do you feel that has evolved over the years since those elections? Maybe it's stayed the same for some levels of elections, but you think about it differently for other levels of elections. I'm just sort of curious about how that very understandable, reasonable perspective, whether and how that has changed over time.

Zach

You know, you start to see more local elections that are decided on margins, and those really do matter. Kansas recently voted to uphold abortion in the state of Kansas, and that was kind of a surprise to everybody in the state. And so, it's when you see those surprise elections that you go, oh, okay, this thing really does matter. As long as we believe that our vote matters and we are willing to go to the polls and, you know, go through with it over and over, you start to see that things can happen. Yeah.

Mara

Yeah. And you just touched on one of the major reasons why I'm doing this podcast is that I really want to encourage folks to think about the values that they hold behind their engagement or non-engagement with democracy because I've come to understand for myself the act of voting as so much more than...am I getting my preferred policy preferences or am I feeling descriptively represented by the folks I elect? That's important, but there's such a, for me, I've developed such a deep attachment to the act in a way that sort of transcends those things. And so the feeling that one's vote matters and having an understanding of what...a vote mattering means is something that, I'm, yeah, I'm encouraging more folks to think about.

And so I really appreciate you sort of bringing up it's that literal sense of efficacy, like is my casting this ballot going to have an impact? But there's also, I think, the deeper, the deeper meaning behind the act that we can think about. So now I would love to hear just for my own curiosity, but I think it will be a fascinating story for listeners to hear your career trajectory, life trajectory, sort of how have you been has your personal relationship with this democratic system evolved over time? And, cause it sounds like it's something that was piquing your curiosity, perhaps from a young age, maybe not intensely so, but then you're also combating with this sense of, does the system really matter? Am I really making a difference? So I just would love to hear more about that.

Zach

You know, you talking about kind of what voting means to you. To me, it's a very personal connection to people, is kind of my connection. And particularly, and we'll get to this, it's the people that conduct elections. Like they go out and they're doing this mostly out of a sense of patriotism, being connected to the actual act in a very, even more substantive way. And I think that is really awesome and, you know, just something that I have recently just really come to appreciate.

So, so the story is this. Bush v. Gore and 9-11 happens. It's like, oh man, this is crazy. I really was thinking I'd be an engineer, but really I got really interested in policy, just really, really interested in policy and government. So I was taking an economics class at the time…those levers that they were talking about in economics, supply and demand and how different things change people's incentives, that really connected with my engineering brain. And then it also kind of connected with my...politics brain and how incentives change people's behavior. So I just got really interested in government and economics, ended up getting a degree in economics and then going to graduate school to work in local government again because I felt like, you know, my voice at a national level doesn't mean much but at a local level it will be much more, you know, significant and I can make...you know, policy happened at the local level.

I took my first job out of school was right during the Great Recession. And so that was, yeah, like it's like the millennials, we all have this kind of certain sense of like the way the world has played out. And it has really influenced a lot of us, I think.

And so, you know, I was, I was let go for lots of political reasons. And, um, it was, it was, it was crazy. Um, but I went back to school, um, to get my PhD because I became really, really interested in the relationship between accounting and debt and local government finances, the city that I had been working in had some really bad accounting policies and had taken on a lot of debt. And so, uh, I really wanted to understand that connection better. I had done some work on it in graduate school. So how does one jump from counting and debt to elections?

Mara

Well- I'm so excited to hear this, please. I just want you to like, my enthusiasm is so high right now, go ahead.

Zach

So it was really when I took my job at UNC Charlotte to teach budgeting and counting. And I just remember the first time Martha was talking in a department meeting. We'd had a job search about some candidates and Martha got really excited about one of the accounting candidates. We had another person coming in that was studying accounting. And Martha got so excited because she started talking about ballot design versus financial reporting. And she was like drawing these connections.

And I'm like, yeah, you're right. Like how you...lay out a ballot and how we lay out financial reports influences peoples and like that really connected me and so Marth and I when we talk about this week we often talk about the meeting that we have where we went lunch short afterwards and Martha had been finishing up her book on elections administration she basically told me is that by the way you know you do local government budgeting accounting stuff the one thing that realize don't know much about is cost of uh... elections administration so if you ever find this uh... data on this we can probably what re write a paper to about it and I thought okay I'll keep I'll keep my eyes out i said you know more say it there's highly unlikely uh... costate on this is it's such a small dollar value uh... particularly in uh...counties it's gonna be really hard right like this is gonna be but the one thing is we live in a state that has or at the time I was living in North Carolina North Carolina has great elections data and has great financial and so I said Martha if there's ever a state where we could probably find it it's probably gonna be a North Carolina so I'll keep my eyes out.

A few months later, I was working on a project with a student that's totally unrelated to elections. And we're in the local government database. We were downloading it and looking at the data. I said, oh, by the way, let's quick look and let's do a search. And oh my gosh, it had such good data on the elections administration costs and expenditures. And so I went to Martha and I said, hey, you know, I did find that data. She goes, okay, we'll start a paper. And we started a paper and that's like five or six papers ago. And you know, now we have a book that will be hopefully coming out in the next year or so on the cost of elections administration in the country. We've collected cost data on elections administration from 48 out of 50 states.

Mara

So I want to, for folks who are listening, first of all, to emphasize for people who are not familiar with the world of collecting data in general, but especially data in a system of federalism like the United States, that is 50 states.

Like we don't even have like an accurate, like, is it what? Ten thousand-ish maybe. We don't even know like the count of jurisdictions. And I know this from a personal perspective because my co-author, Lia and I have tried to collect all of the social media accounts for every election office in the United States. And we've done a pretty dang good job of that. But still, so for folks who are listening, like this is an enormous gargantuan effort.

And the other is a small piece of context I wanted to add for folks who aren't familiar. Zach and I run in the same circles and Martha Kropf is a related colleague of ours, and I could probably sing Martha's praises as you could for hours. Sure, for sure. I just wanted to give a little shout out to Martha Croft at UNC Charlotte's, who just is been, it sounds like a good mentor for you, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Zach

Yeah, yeah. She's been a great mentor, not only in collections, but also in accounting of what I do. She's helped a lot in different ways. Mary Jo McGowan has also been great to work with and we make a great little team. Yeah. And I also want to thank Charles Stewart and the whole MEDSL team for the grants that they gave us for doing the data collection. Like you said, collecting this data was incredibly hard. Literally, students had to download these financial reports. They had to first identify them, and then they would download them from the annual financial reports and then they transfer them to the data set. And I mean, it was just completely, completely laborious and just mind numbing work. So Rob and Madison and we had others that worked on different parts, but definitely Rob and Madison. They They were great. They were just absolutely wonderful GTAs to help us do that. But it is a massive, massive task. It's taken us six years to do it.

Mara

So one observation or just thought that I had when you were talking about sort of the small slice of budgets that are allocated to elections, it strikes me that it is a small thing in a dollar amount, perhaps. But like the significance of it, we're looking at the  things that make American democracy happen. And so that's sort of my pitch to anyone who might be listening to prioritize this information and prioritize funding elections more because literally it wouldn't happen without those resources. So you may feel differently, but that's how I feel.

Zach

No, no, I do increasingly feel that way. I mean, I...as I said, I was agnostic about it. I am just a straight researcher that came in with a very simple question. How much are we spending on elections? And you know, the dollar value is not insignificant. We spend two and a half to three billion dollars a year on average in this country to conduct elections. It's important to note that Americans, like we vote more than like any other country around like advanced, any advanced country. We are voting on a lot of offices all the time. Which I actually think that might be a bit of a problem and I think we should think about ways to maybe consolidate when we vote and how we vote to better, one, be more efficient but also make it more important to more people.

But it's a small dollar value only in proportion to the larger government, right? So we're spending quite a bit of money on this and it varies a lot. It's important to note that, you know, in some jurisdictions they may only be spending a dollar or two per voter, but in some places they're spending $20, $30, sometimes as much as $100 per voter in a very rural place, they spend a lot of money to do the outreach, to get opportunities for people to vote.

So it's not a one-size-fits-all--this is not McDonald's--and we have very different communities and they have... very different elections and they cost very different uh... to do that uh... so you know we spend something like you know one to two percent of the county's budget goes to elections administration.

Charles Stewart likes to point out that that's less than is spend on parking garages in this country.  County government spent more on parking facilities than we do on election uh... that's terrible insults and like said that that massive importance of voting is uh...is  really important but it's just really important for people to realize that local governments have a lot of things that they're doing.

So you know when we first started presenting our work that the most amusing what's with the reactions from political scientists that says, “What do you mean they make trade-offs? Why would they make trade-offs? These are elected politicians. They would have the most incentive to fully fund elections.” And that's just not the case at the local level. The schools, the police, and the roads, they're so much more visible. And the election is always two, four years away.

And...you get that there's this time element to it, and so we've done some work looking at the impact of time and uh... you know things that things that have impacts that can be way in the future we underfunded we underfunded because they're so far away or the perception is that they're so far away they're not right around the corner, but we have more immediate pressing needs at the local level especially.

There might be some reasons that, you know, why we may need to rethink that funding model.

Mara

Sure, sure. And that leads me into a question that I wanna ask you before we sort of wrap things up and move back to that big picture question about this forthcoming book. I believe the title is A Republic If You Can Pay For It. Am I remembering that? Yeah, if you can afford it. If you can afford it, thank you, thank you. Do you have any specific...policy implication hopes? Is there something that you would like to see this work used for and or are you putting it out there to just let other folks decide what to do with the information?

Zach

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that...I do hope that it gets used in a policy sense. I think one of the big policy things that's going to come about from it is a greater awareness of how different funding is for elections from state to state and that we may need to address those funding disparities. And in the last chapter, and this is really the chapter that Martha brilliantly took the lead on is that there is a connection between money and the voters experience and people have more faith when we take elections more seriously and that means often funding.

So we, you know, I think that there will be some some good discussions that come up, I hope. It's a first look though. I mean, like there's so many more assays that we can do. We're gonna release the data when the book gets published, and then y'all researchers just run with it. It's gonna be awesome.

Mara

So I absolutely can guarantee you that we will be merging the data when it's available with all of our voter education data.

We’ve done surveys of state election officials and also interviews with them. And have obviously anecdotally talked to some local election officials that when funding goes, the first thing to get cut is voter education. Is that in line with what you’ve found?

Zach

Anecdotally, that is exactly what I'm hearing as well. Is that, you know, that's one of the few things that is optional in the voter voting world, and you know, that's the first thing that goes. Yeah, not because it's something that they want to go, but it's, they have an election to run. And that's the priority.

Mara

So I think that it's a great time to sort of move back to the question that is at the heart of this podcast, which I think that you've touched on implicitly kind of throughout our conversation, but I would love to hear your recap on the question of what voting means to you as you interpret it in any way. There's no wrong answer.

Zach

Yeah. No, for me, voting is a connection to the people that do voting and run voting. I've had the absolute pleasure because of Martha and all the connections she and others have made available to me, but also my prior work in local government to connect with elections administrators and the folks that work on and around Election Day to make voting happen. And these are really...the heroes in my mind of elections.

And we all have a part to play in that, in going vote, but the people that go and they volunteer, especially in a very challenging post 2020 environment, it makes me very angry these days. When...people criticize election administrators and the work that election administrators do. So if anything, that has made me, that's what's made me passionate about this and made me really want to fight.

Mara

Yeah. I...I'm feeling this so deeply through the Zoom screen because the more and more I look at the work that election officials do to communicate with their voters and talk to them about their work and hear these kinds of stories, it does make me so angry. And I want everyone to, I wish everyone would watch the No Time to Fail documentary. Or even, have you ever heard of this documentary? It's called By the People, it’s set in Marion County, Indiana in 2004, and I show it to my students, and they are blown away by the safeguards and the security and the care and the steps. And yes, mistakes are made, but they're rectified. And so, yeah, you're speaking to something that is so close to my heart in terms of wanting to get more people excited to learn about how elections are run, because it's really cool. And it's, yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Zach

It really is. And you know, I feel like anybody that really actually gets involved with it and sees all the different safeguards and ways that people from both parties are involved these days, it's really, it'd be really tough. And like you said, there's so many safeguards in place.

I've had the unbelievable fortune and connections to get in and go see that as somebody, again, somebody that I am not a political science junkie. I am not somebody that naturally comes into this world. I'm more of an accounting person. So I come at this from a very neutral standpoint. The level of controls, if we think about this, is an accounting exercise. The county is an accounting exercise. Sure. The level of controls are unbelievably high. For 8,000 jurisdictions in a federal election, 10,000 plus when we're talking about local races

Yeah, it's amazing that we're able to do what we're able to do. And it really just comes down to all those people at the state and local level that conduct elections and the amazing amount of work and patience and perseverance that they put into it.

Mara

Well, I think that is a wonderful note to conclude on in terms of appreciating the work that election officials and poll workers across the country do.

Is there anything I didn't ask that you would like to discuss or anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up?

Zach

No, this is great. This is great. I'm looking forward to seeing it and seeing what comes of it. Yeah. We'll see what the 2024 race holds. I think that's going to be the next big challenge. It is.

Mara

It is. Yeah, it does keep me up at night, admittedly.

Zach

I mean, the most recent...you know mostly local races you know the fentanyl it sent through the mail. I mean scary stuff yeah i mean it's it’s crazy that we're happy to have the anti opioid drugs at election places because people are yet making actual threats towards elections administrators.

We need to just call it out.

Mara

Yeah, we do. Yeah, and for folks who aren't familiar, this fall there was fentanyl that was mailed to some election offices and there was threatening letters, I think in Oregon, but I know a couple of other places as well. Oh yeah, California, Kansas, there were several states that got mailed to elections. Yes, and we absolutely do need to call it out because that is just...never okay. I feel like I shouldn't even need to say that. I shouldn't even need to say that.

Well thank you so much. This has been such a delight and a pleasure. I love talking to fellow election nerds and election scientists and interdisciplinary work is the best work. So interdisciplinary work is really great. It's really great.

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