Aldous Huxley commented that consistency “is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” If so, then the American electoral system, with its local diversity in rules, practices, and political culture, is a living, breathing, and evolving entity. One of the distinguishing characteristics of American elections compared to other advanced democracies is the absence of uniform, “nationalized” elections. Instead, voting and counting ballots are fundamentally local activities. While localism is a boon for political scientists, given the opportunities for natural experiments it creates, allowing local interpretations of such a basic democratic right has been problematic historically. To what extent are local differences in procedures and practices permissible if they have a demonstrable impact on individuals' ability or propensity to participate in elections? This question underlies debates over election reform in the United States, and these reforms in turn motivate and inform the three works reviewed here.

In The Way We Vote, Alec Ewald, the author of prominent research on voter registration and felony disenfranchisement, provides a thorough account of the origins and history of the American tradition of decentralized control of elections. The vagaries inherent in this highly localized system of administration are often fodder for critics, but Ewald takes a different approach, acknowledging the variation in the system while arguing that localism is both intentional and beneficial. His major theoretical contribution stems from the argument that the right to vote is fundamentally a “practice” (p. 9) conditioned by local institutions that administer elections. While the right to vote is derived from the law, the local institutions that execute the law and administer the actual process of voting are equally important components of suffrage in practice. Those local institutions vary in the United States to a degree unique among democracies.

The bulk of Ewald's book is devoted to a detailed account of the origin, history, and evolution of shared local, state, and national control of elections in the United States. This is the strength of the book, making it of particular interest to scholars of American political development. The history of American suffrage shows that control of the electoral process is decentralized by design. It reflects both the American interpretation of democratic ideals and practical considerations. Reaching back to colonial times, Ewald explains how elections evolved from operations purely under local control to the complex mix of congressional mandates, court rulings, state laws, and local practices that exists today. While recognizing the value of the element of centralized control—the Voting Rights Act, for example, was inarguably beneficial by ensuring the consistent application of rights—he argues that local practices are an essential component of self-rule and popular sovereignty.

This segues into Ewald's core account of the four benefits of localism: increased efficacy and ownership of the political process, the potential for innovation and experimentation, the diffusion of power as a bulwark against the centralized authority, and increased participation driven by social approbation when local institutions are instrumental to the electoral process. Ultimately, Ewald makes a valuable distinction between standardization and uniformity as goals of election reform. He argues that reforms are best focused on standardizing elections—ensuring transparency, accuracy, fairness, participation, and equal access. But reforms neither can nor should seek to enforce uniformity, defined as ensuring that all voters across the country have identical experiences on Election Day. In other words, variable aspects of elections, such as the method of voting, polling hours, and provision of alternative voting methods, should remain under local control to maximize the benefits of localism.

While The Way We Vote is primarily historical in its analysis, Discount Voting offers the cutting edge of mixed-methods research on the relationship between voter turnout and electoral rules. Michael Hanmer, whose work has established him as a rising name in research on turnout and voting technology, tackles a question that has plagued scholars of American turnout for the past three decades. If, as the existing literature argues, registration is a costly barrier to voting, why have structural reforms that facilitate registration done so little to improve turnout? He focuses on two reforms—Election Day registration (EDR) and both state and federal “motor voter” laws that combine driver services, such as renewing a license, with voter registration.

Hanmer's simple but elegant main argument, echoing Ewald's work, is that electoral reforms are not randomly distributed; they are endogenous to the social and political cultures that produce them. That adopting EDR in Wisconsin produces x increase in turnout does not mean that the same increase would be observed in other states adopting an identical law. The same cultural norms that produce higher turnout increase the likelihood of passing reforms aimed at increasing participation. This identification problem is often overlooked, he argues, and registration reforms are treated as exogenous. Rather than simply comparing voters in states with and without reforms, Hanmer proposes a difference-in-difference method that pairs each state in which treatment effects are present with a control state that has similar population characteristics but lacks the treatment.

The result, Hanmer argues, is a more realistic appraisal of the effects of registration reform on turnout. He concludes that EDR boosts turnout by approximately 4.5%, or less than half the estimate of previous studies that treated reforms as exogenous. Motor voter laws, when passed voluntarily by states (i.e., prior to the mandate of the National Voter Registration Act), increased turnout but fell far short of expectations. Furthermore, states that adopted motor voter as a result of the congressional mandate saw meager increases in turnout compared to states that adopted the policy on their own. Overall, his findings strongly support the central argument regarding the endogeneity of state-level registration reforms.

The sobering fact, Hanmer concludes, is that there is no quick structural fix to the problem of low turnout. Registration reforms lower the costs of voting but have little effect on individuals' motivation or sense of political efficacy. Reforms are best understood as long-term investments in building a society that values democratic practices, not as means of obtaining short-term benefits. Of these three books, Discount Voting is most specifically aimed at scholars doing quantitative research on turnout in the United States, as its strongest contribution is the author's detailed examination of, and proposed alternative to, the methodological limit of previous research on registration reform and turnout. Accordingly, its appeal may not be as broad as The Way We Vote or Democracy in the States, but scholars and policymakers interested in the costs of voting, registration, and turnout should consider it required reading.

As expected from an edited volume, Democracy in the States defines reform broadly and covers a diverse range of issues under the umbrella of election reform. Editors Bruce Cain, Todd Donovan, and Caroline J. Tolbert effectively unite the 14 chapters from various contributors by arguing that reforms can be categorized by their primary goals: promoting the integrity of the electoral process, promoting participation, or promoting responsiveness to citizen preferences. This approach exposes the reader to an array of reform proposals and electoral issues, from the training and job satisfaction of poll workers to redistricting, term limits, and multimember legislative districts. The combination of quality and breadth in this volume makes it a good candidate for use as a course reader in a graduate or advanced undergraduate seminar on elections and voting behavior. The contributions are data intensive but written so that the findings and implications are accessible to nonspecialists.

While the majority of the literature on election reform focuses on issues of participation, Cain, Donovan, and Tolbert effectively make the case for the importance of promoting integrity in an era of plummeting public faith in the fairness and accuracy of the electoral process. In the wake of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, less than 40% of Americans believe elections are “very” or “somewhat” honest. In the first section on promoting integrity, Lonna Rae Atkinson and Kyle Saunders (Chapter 2) argue that improving the Election Day experience is an essential component of citizens' faith in the integrity of elections. Individual voters are exposed to only a minute piece of the election as a whole—a single polling place and a handful of poll workers. Thad Hall, J. Quin Monson, and Kelly D. Patterson (Chapter 3) follow by emphasizing the key role of training and educating poll workers in voters' perceptions of the voting experience. This discussion is among the strongest in the volume, and it draws attention to an underrepresented issue in current research.

Reforms promoting participation, conversely, are widely studied and, according to Cain (Chapter 14), are the most commonly enacted due to the legal system's sympathy toward and willingness to act upon issues of disenfranchisement. The second section considers a sample of such participation-driven reforms, including county “voting centers,” early voting, and EDR. Finally, the volume concludes with a range of contributions on reforms promoting responsiveness, including term limits, redistricting reforms, multimember districts, and the effects of ballot access laws on electoral competition. The editors present responsiveness, particularly the lack of competitiveness in modern elections, as a pressing issue that reforms have been largely ineffective at addressing, as illustrated in contributions from Barry Burden, Michael McDonald, Thad Kousser, and Christopher Cooper.

These authors' arguments are not without flaws. In Hanmer's case, the six strong chapters of theory and empirical analysis are followed by a concluding chapter of policy prescriptions for improving turnout that falls flat. After dismissing compulsory voting as politically infeasible and legally dubious, the recommendation to motivate participation by “[fostering] belief in democracy” (p. 192) and increasing public understanding thereof is logical but vague and not necessarily more feasible. How this goal, which has eluded policymakers for years, can be achieved is not convincingly explained.

Ewald makes a compelling historical case for local variation as a fundamental characteristic of American elections, but the contention that it is a valuable one is more suspect. He argues that efforts to nationalize procedures can disenfranchise voters, citing the recent Help America Vote Act photo ID requirements as an example. Historically, though, localism and disenfranchisement have too often been virtually synonymous—the Jim Crow South and pre–Nineteenth Amendment state-level variation in women's suffrage are prominent examples. Ewald recognizes these problems but argues that localism was also part of the solution. For instance, Congress made state and local officials responsible for administering the Voting Rights Acts. Suggesting localism as both the cause of and solution to historical instances of disenfranchisement is problematic, as it bolsters the argument that suffrage has a strong local component but weakens the claim that localism is a net positive to the electoral process.

Finally, Democracy in the States could improve with a more thorough discussion of alternatives and policy prescriptions for future reforms. The editors and contributors convincingly argue that reforms promoting integrity and responsiveness have been minimally successful thus far, but the discussion of potential alternatives is de-emphasized in several chapters, as well as in the editors' contributions.

Despite these criticisms, these three books are meticulously researched, theoretically grounded, and highly relevant to one of the most important issues in contemporary American politics. The question of who votes is fundamental to democracy, and understanding the relationship between electoral institutions and citizen participation in elections is at the heart of the current literature on voting behavior. These books combine the state of the art in empirical research on election reform and a detailed analysis of the history and origins of the rules governing modern American elections. They are highly recommended to political scientists, historians, and public policy scholars with an interest in the past, present, and future of election reform and the “not-so-simple act” of voting.