Strengthening the electoral profession: a call to connect

Strengthening the electoral profession: a call to connect

On 4 June 2026, ICPS hosted Strengthening the Electoral Profession: How to Improve Knowledge Sharing. ICPS and the Electoral Stakeholders' Network created this session as part of our commitment to facilitating greater knowledge sharing across the electoral community.

We were joined by Sy Mamabolo, Chief Electoral Officer of the Electoral Commission of South Africa; Tammy Patrick of the Election Center in the United States; and Sean Evins, co-founder of NOMOS. The discussion turned on a single question: how does the electoral profession hold on to what it knows? One line from the session captured the challenge:

"The issue isn't lacking knowledge. The issue is the trusted infrastructure that brings it all together." Knowledge stays siloed inside institutions, temporary workforces disengage between cycles, and the same problems get solved twice.

Knowledge that leaves with people

Sy Mamabolo opened by reframing the problem. Knowledge sharing, he argued, is not an end in itself. It improves the institutional effectiveness of electoral management bodies (EMBs), and through that, the quality of elections and the experience of voters.

"The quality of elections," he said, "depends significantly on the quality of electoral knowledge possessed by those who administer elections."

The difficulty is what becomes of that knowledge. It is, in his words, "dispersed, tacit and vulnerable to staff turnover". A commission can run a near-flawless poll and keep little of what it learned, because the judgement that made it work was never written down.

The sector is not short of raw material. What is missing, he suggested, is the habit and the means of holding on to it. "Knowledge must not only be transferred," he said. "It has to be preserved."

A view from 10,000 jurisdictions

Tammy Patrick, who leads programmes at the Election Center, the national association of American election officials, gave the view from a system with more than 10,000 election jurisdictions.

Since 2020, she said, the United States has been losing the people who know how its elections work, in what she called "the mass exodus", driven in part by "the threats and actual acts of violence against our election officials".

The result is a kind of institutional amnesia. Offices are busy, she explained, and processes often go unwritten, living only in the mind of the person who happens to do the job. "Oftentimes offices may not have memorialised their processes," she said. "It just happens to be in the mind of the person who is serving in that capacity, and so when they leave, it creates a real void." Sometimes there is no handbook at all, and no routine of reviewing one after each election. When an experienced official departs, the office can find itself relearning work it had already mastered, the same lessons paid for twice.

The shape of the workforce makes it harder. By her figures, 75% of American election officials serve just 8% of voters, and more than a third of offices have no full-time election official at all. Reaching the one-person rural office "has been a big challenge", with much of the work falling to state associations and informal mentorship. Despite hard work across the country, knowledge sharing at scale remains a challenge.

Not a knowledge problem, a connection problem

Sean Evins, co-founder of NOMOS, built on the two speakers before him.

His point was singular: there is a great deal of excellent work across the sector, but very little of it is connected.

The consequence, he said, is that knowledge stays siloed inside institutions, temporary workforces disengage between cycles, and the same problems get solved twice over.

Where NOMOS fits

Sean presented NOMOS which closes that gap. It begins with a verified professional identity for each election worker, issued by their own institution and carried with them between cycles rather than reset at each election. A returning temporary worker, in other words, is reactivated rather than rediscovered from scratch.

Around that sits a single curated feed of news, legislative change and research, in place of the scattered inboxes and messaging groups many bodies rely on now. There is a verified community of peers, and a shared knowledge base that stays with the institution when an experienced official leaves.

He stressed that security is built in from the start, with each organisation controlling its own data and deciding what to share. Consumer tools, he argued, were never designed for this work: "you need something that is built for you".

NOMOS is designed to connect individual contributors to electoral management bodies and address a key challenge of knowledge loss between election cycles.

A call to connect

The session kept returning to one idea. The electoral sector does not have a knowledge problem. What it lacks is the trusted infrastructure to connect what it already has.

That is the work we want to take forward with you. In the lead up to the International Electoral Awards and Symposium in Manila this November, we are working with EMBs and electoral organisations that want to explore verified professional identities to their election workers, deepen engagement with permanent and temporary staff, and run their own NOMOS environment.

Between now and November, we'll be writing to you further about this opportunity. If your organisation would like to get involved sooner, please connect with Tracy Capaldi Drewett, Executive Vice President of ICPS, at tracy.drewett@parlicentre.co.uk.