Runoff elections — including today’s in Alabama and Georgia — stress existing fragilities in rural election administration.
“Challenges are exacerbated by the short timeline of a runoff,” said Cameron Wimpy, political science professor and director of the Institute for Rural Initiatives at Arkansas State University. “And then other challenges become exacerbated by the fact that you’re just having to do a whole election again.”
More than two-thirds of American elections happen in rural areas, according to Wimpy. Although elections are administered – and often, largely financed – locally, counties must meet state standards.
“A lot of things in election administration have to happen the same, whether you’re in a small place or a large place, an urban place or a rural place,” Wimpy said. “Voting machines have to be tested, boxes have to be checked, laws have to be followed, but that’s often being done with less people.”
There are 10 states with runoff elections: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. Each state has unique state laws governing how and when those elections occur.
“Election administration is an orphan child of public administration in so many places in different ways — and even the fact that I say different ways is part of the problem,” said Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at MIT and the director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “It’s not like you go to school and learn election administration, and that you can do that anywhere. You really have to learn it locally.”
Wimpy said that rural election officials rank communication with voters about timelines and policy changes as their top concern — above staffing and resource concerns.
Wimpy said the closure of local papers in rural communities leaves election administrators without a reliable way to communicate with the public.
About 80% of news deserts are in USDA-classified rural counties, according to Northwestern University’s 2025 State of Local News report. In the absence of local newspapers, rural election administrators often use personal or governmental Facebook pages to get election updates to voters.
Existing Challenges in Rural Election Administration Become Heightened With Condensed Runoff Timelines
Wimpy said that rural election administrators are frustrated by the slowness of election mail ahead of tight mail ballot deadlines.
“If it takes 10 days or more for something to go to Memphis and back across town, then a three-week runoff turnaround becomes fairly tight,” Wimpy said.
Election mail has to travel out of rural communities, to larger city centers to be sorted, and then back.
“Many mail ballots are coming in after the deadline, which frustrates [election officials] as administrators, but also on behalf of their voters: they feel like they’re not serving their voters,” Wimpy said.
Recruiting a sufficient number of poll workers in rural areas with declining populations is another existing challenge in rural election administration that resurfaces with runoff elections, according to Wimpy.
Wimpy’s recent study on election administration in the Mississippi Delta found that elections administrators in most remote places were unable to recruit enough poll workers to meet state-mandated requirements.
“They simply could not get enough people to run the election properly, and they were just having to go forward with it anyway, because what else were they going to do?” Wimpy said. “But they worry about it, it keeps them up at night.”
Rural Counties Are Less Equipped to Bear the Cost of Low-Turnout Runoffs
Rural counties have a less diverse tax base to fund their elections, according to Stewart.
“Metro areas have a portfolio of economic activities: they oftentimes have industrial and commercial properties that can be taxed at higher rates, have higher economic value — that lowers on a per capita basis the tax burden on residents, on residential property,” Stewart said. “In rural areas, that tax base is on residential property or an agricultural property — which is going to be less economically productive, and so you’re either going to have to skimp or raise taxes.”
Many states with runoff elections — including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — provide ranked choice ballots for military and overseas voters in lieu of a runoff.
“That’s a different experience, and ideally voters are having a similar experience — no matter where they are and who they are,” Wimpy said.
Turnout in both rural and urban areas is often lower in runoff elections: the median decline in turnout was 40% in primary runoff elections for Congress from 1994 to 2022, according to FairVote.
Wimpy said that his research suggests that runoff turnout is even lower in rural counties — the more rural, the lower turnout.
“The fewer people involved, the less democratic it is,” Wimpy said.
The population who votes in runoffs tends to not be representative, according to Wimpy.
“People with the resources and the highly, highly motivated partisans are the ones driving the election outcomes — and that’s probably not the way it should work if we really care about everyone participating,” Wimpy said.
The History of Runoff Elections
Runoffs historically ensured that Southern racial moderates — who positioned themselves against segregationists but without supporting racial equality — would not be nominated to office, should segregationist candidates split the primary vote, according to Stewart.
“[Runoff elections] come up from the time when the Democratic primary really was the election, so the primary was the primary, and the runoff was the general election,” Stewart said.
Rural communities, facing population declines, have consolidated resources by working cooperatively with neighboring counties or towns to provide services like education or EMS.
The same, however, cannot be done with election administration where constitutional provisions require ballots be counted in the jurisdiction they’re cast.
The diversity of state election law, however, makes it impossible to generalize about the state of rural election administration. Stewart said that Georgia, for instance, runs counter to the rule that election administration has not benefited from consolidation like other services have.
Georgia’s state government provides elections equipment to counties, leaving counties to function as “remote offices of the state” and local election administrators — rural or urban — to focus on “the last mile implementation of voting”: recruiting poll workers, identifying polling locations — rather than administrative functions, according to Stewart.
Despite challenges in rural election administration, rural election administration outperforms urban counterparts in certain areas — like higher trust in local elections officials, according to Wimpy.
“People know each other,” Wimpy said. “There’s a comfort level in the rural voting and election administration experience that likely doesn’t exist in a very contentious place like Fulton County.”
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