With a general election due before the end of next year and numerous other elections set for the next 12 months, concerns have been raised about the ability to recruit enough temporary poll workers to staff polling stations, check voter ID and count the votes cast. Sarah Birch, Ferran Martínez i Coma and Rubén Ruiz-Rufino argue that sortition might provide a solution, allowing us to staff elections in the same way that we recruit jury members.

As the UK gears up for the 2024 electoral season, serious concerns are being voiced about the ability of local authorities to carry out the tasks entrusted to them. New requirements such as checking ID at polling stations have placed further strain on what was already a daunting challenge for many Electoral Returning Officers: staffing elections.

When we go to vote, few of us stop to think about the army of temporary workers who are regularly recruited to run polling stations and to count ballots. However, a recent report by the Association of Electoral Administrators has voiced considerable disquiet about the ability of local authorities to continue finding the people needed to do these jobs.

In the light of this, it would make sense for the UK to consider a system used in Spain, Belgium, Greece and a number of other countries: the recruitment of poll workers by lot (with training, compensation and exemptions). Juries have for centuries been composed via random selection, and this is a practice that has widespread legitimacy. Not only would such a system address the recruitment challenges faced by returning officers, it could very likely also help to address problems with popular confidence in the voting process and citizen engagement in elections.

Sortition is an ancient selection device, associated with Aristotelian notions of governance, that has a venerable tradition in the criminal justice systems of many countries. More recently, a number of democratic theorists, political scientists and practitioners have developed randomly selected democratic decision-making institutions such as citizens’ assemblies, mini-publics and even legislative chambers that link selection by lot to theories of deliberative democracy. Giving administrative roles directly to ordinary people has the potential to address populist concerns about elite abuses of power, while at the same time being inclusive and egalitarian. In the electoral sphere, it is quite possible that citizens will be less likely to contest electoral outcomes if they, or people like them, have taken part in overseeing polling

If this is true in the UK context, then using random selection in the electoral context would have a number of additional advantages, over and above solving current staffing issues. For people who rarely turn out, the institutions governing elections can appear quite alien. The selection of poll workers via sortition would, over the course of several election cycles, pepper communities with members from all walks of life who had a high degree of knowledge of how voting and counting work. Before long, most people would probably know at least one person who had served as a poll worker at some point. Elections would then not seem quite so ‘other’ to traditional non-voters.

Those called to do poll work themselves would benefit the most in civic terms. Two recent academic studies have shown that people who are selected at random to staff polling stations have greater confidence in electoral institutions as well as a greater sense of civic engagement and empowerment than other people. These include a 2023 working paper by Ignacio Jurado and Joaquin Artés entitled ‘Compulsory Civic Duty and Turnout: Evidence from a Natural Experiment’, as well as another 2023 working paper by Noam Lupu called ‘Poll Workers and the Effects of Supportive Political Participation’. A further study from last year provides evidence of how this comes about, showing that poll work increases ‘bridging’ capital  and thus social investment in/ownership of the electoral process. Indeed, previous research on poll workers has found that in the UK context, those involved in running polling places have more positive perceptions of electoral integrity than the general public. The selection of poll workers by lot would, over time, extend this benefit to a greater number of people.

Moreover, the direct involvement of a wide range of citizens in election-day activities would mean that when people go to the local community hall to cast their ballot, they would be more likely to find someone like them working there. Political parties typically post their own volunteers to polling stations on election day, but the people with whom voters have formal interactions are those in charge of running polling stations. Under the current UK system, poll workers tend to be on average older than the population at large, which could well encourage young people to think that voting is not something for them. Given that electoral abstention is greatest among younger groups, the recruitment of poll workers by lot could well go some way toward addressing the problem of political engagement.

For all these reasons – addressing the poll worker recruitment crisis, boosting confidence in elections, and enhancing political engagement – the UK would do well to explore sortition as an alternative approach to the recruitment of polling staff. To kick this process off, a low-cost pilot study could easily be carried out. Given that confidence in electoral conduct has dropped in recent years, bolstering public trust and engagement in polling is an urgent priority. Poll worker recruitment has the advantage that it is a technical issue that is not likely to become highly politicised, making this fertile terrain for improvements to our electoral architecture.

If you are interested in the subject of this post, you can watch the author’s contribution to the Unit’s summer conference, which took place in late June. She appeared on the Elections and Electoral Reform panel, alongside Lord (Robert) Hayward, John Pullinger and Cat Smith MP. 

The full list of panels, with links to video and podcast versions of each section of the conference, is on the Unit website.

About the authors

Sarah Birch is Professor of Political Science at King’s College London.

Dr Ferran Martínez i Coma is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University.

Dr Rubén Ruiz-Rufino is a reader in comparative politics at King’s College London.

Featured image credit: Counting (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Coventry City Council.