NEW YORK, March 11 (Xinhua) -- The polarized voting environment that has come out of the 2020 U.S. election has led to near daily harassment and death threats for some election officials and made the profession unsustainable for many -- now 1 in 5 of them say they are likely to leave their jobs before the 2024 presidential election.
According to these results of a new survey of U.S. local election officials released on Thursday by the Brennan Center for Justice, respondents are split fairly evenly across the political spectrum: 26 percent identified as Democrats, 30 percent as Republicans, and 44 percent say they are independent.
"There's a crisis in election administration," Larry Norden, the senior director of elections and government at the Brennan Center, was quoted by National Public Radio as saying about the poll conducted in early February among 596 local election officials. "They are concerned, and they're not getting the support that they need."
"The poll results show that the 2020 election -- specifically former President Donald Trump's continued false attacks on the legitimacy of the voting process -- is playing a large role in how voting officials feel about their work," said the report.
Of those election officials who said they were likely to leave their jobs before 2024, the most common reasons why were that too many politicians were attacking "a system that they know is fair and honest" and that the job was too stressful, it added. ■