The Invisible Election

By Heather Gerken, Election Law Blog. Posted November 18, 2008.

I draw three lessons from the time I spent watching the invisible election unfold, all of which point to the need to make the invisible election visible to the public, to policymakers, and to election administrators themselves.

First, it is essential that the public see the invisible election. We are never going to get traction on reforming our election system until we have a means of making these problems visible to voters. Virtually every media outlet has reported that the election ran smoothly. The reporting was simply incorrect for a surprising number of jurisdictions. I have recently proposed that we create a Democracy Index, ranking states and localities based on how well they run elections. Without good data on how the election system is performing, voters learn that there's a problem only when an election is so close that the outcome is in doubt and reporters devote the time necessary to investigate what actually happened. That's a bit like measuring annual rainfall by counting how often lightning strikes. The Index would help us assess the problems that occur routinely, before they cause what Rick Hasen has called an "electoral meltdown." Moreover, it would allow voters to reward strong performance. Right now, voters lack the information they need to differentiate between a bullet dodged and a well-run system … between luck and skill, in the words of Thad Hall.

Second, we need to make the invisible election visible to policymakers. Most of the problems I saw from the vantage point of the campaign's boiler room seem to have been caused not by partisan mischief, but by neglect -- too little funding, too few resources devoted to good planning, even something as simple as not enough poll workers showing up. It confirmed my view that we should never attribute to partisanship that which can be adequately explained by inadequate resources. Here again, a Democracy Index would help. Policymakers, like voters, have no means of judging whether and where there's a problem, no sense of the consequences of starving election administrators of resources. Reliable, comparative performance data would help.

Third, election administrators should have been able to see the same kinds of information that I saw on Election Day. The information that scrolled across my computer gave me a tantalizing glimpse of how useful a tool data can be for management. There were many, many problems that could have been fixed quickly and easily if election administrators had the type of real-time monitoring capacity that the Obama campaign had. In a book coming out in the spring, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How to Fix It, I spend a lot of time describing the remarkable uses election administrators have made of the data they have collected. Maricopa County has a real-time trouble-shooting system. Forsyth County, Georgia has precise information on turnout patterns and voter dispersion, something that has allowed it to deploy resources wisely and ensure that every community has equal access to the polls. Maryland has used its electronic poll books to figure out precisely how many poll workers, poll books, and machines it needs at every polling place. The Pew Center on the States has been doing extremely important work identifying "data for democracy" -- the basic information we need if we are serious about how our election system performs. As with the Democracy Index, these efforts should help make the invisible portion of our elections visible and eventually help us create the election system that we deserve.

See more stories tagged with: election administration, 2008 voting problems, 2008 election protection

Heather Gerken is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School where she specializes in election law, constitutional law, and civil procedure.

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