Administrative aspects of contemporary U.S. elections can be pegged as having emerged before or after the watershed case of Bush v. Gore. Although many Americans today will have only hazy memories of the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court’s decision was momentous not just because it resolved a month’s worth of uncertainty about who would be elected president; it also ushered in a new era of election regulation and reform. Most immediately, in 2002, Congress and President George W. Bush enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a bill that provided for better voting machines, various fail-safes for voters, and a new national agency, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). In addition to spurring a range of innovations in how states run elections, the 2000 election inadvertently created a new subfield of study within political science.
Representing this vein, the volume edited by Michael Alvarez and Bernard Grofman provides a rich portrait of election administration reform in the decade following Bush v. Gore and displays the variety of contributions that have been made to understand this era. The collective portrait they paint will be of lasting value because it captures an important point of reckoning about the ability of state and federal governments to fix flaws in the elections system. With election innovations moving so rapidly—often in waves of adoption—the book also provides a snapshot of a crucial time that will aid others who, years from now, want to reconstruct the narrative of the way that U.S. election practices have been reinvented or ignored.
An edited volume of this kind is not easy to summarize because it lacks a central narrative. Indeed, one lesson of Election Administration in the United States is that election reform has advanced unevenly from one domain to another. The editors’ introduction does provide a set of eight criteria for successful elections discussed at the conference that spawned the volume. These criteria include standards on which nearly all observers agree (e.g., minimizing the number of invalid ballots) as well as those that are somewhat more contentious (e.g., making voting easy and convenient).
The chapter by Charles Stewart III provides what might be the definitive history of the creation of HAVA and its consequences, some intended, some not. Most observers are aware that “early voting” has escalated both by law and practice in the years since Bush v. Gore, and two chapters naturally analyze the causes and effects of the early voting revolution. But Stewart suggests that HAVA only tangentially touched on pre-election day voting. He concludes that HAVA has been quite successful in improving how ballots are cast and counted, has had unclear effects on voting by those with disabilities, and has perhaps inadvertently fueled partisan debates about election security and fraudulent voting that continue today.
The most troubling chapter may be Martha Kropf’s review of changes in ballot design. Design was a key issue in the 2000 Florida debacle, in large part because of the confusing “butterfly ballot” layout used on a punch card voting machine in Palm Beach County. Although many bills to improve ballot design were introduced in state legislatures in the years right after Bush v. Gore, few became law, and the number of new bills declined over the rest of the decade. To assess improvements in design, Kropf coded the design attributes of paper ballots from the 2002 and 2010 elections, using guidance from the EAC and academic reports to identify best practices. Her main conclusion is that ballot design did not improve much over that time period and in some cases actually worsened. For example, although ballots were written at a lower grade level in 2010, they were less likely to add shading to office titles as was recommended to clarify the voter's task.
In what may be the most prophetic chapter, Alvarez and Thad E. Hall identify limitations of the voter registration system that could be remedied by shifting from a “passive” approach to an “active” approach, or what today is called “automatic” or “universal” voter registration. Anticipating the direction in which some states would move, they argue that an active registration system that makes use of existing state data from motor vehicle agencies, tax offices, and other sources would improve “cost, ease, and accuracy” (p. 191). Most interesting is their suggestion that the section of HAVA that mandated state voter files might also imply that states must employ these kinds of interagency electronic networks.
The quality and maintenance of these registration databases have many implications, a key one being the treatment of felons. The 2000 meltdown cast light on the problems involved in tracking ineligible felons and the severe racial imbalance in disenfranchisement that often results. The chapter by Khalilah L. Brown-Dean reviews legal developments around felon disenfranchisement, documenting the modest reforms that have been spurred by court decisions and state policymakers. Brown-Dean hints at some of the promising changes to criminal justice policy that would later get some attention, but the overall picture is one of legal stasis when it comes to racial disparities and felon disenfranchisement.
Legal debates about felons are but a small part of the wave of election litigation that has blossomed since Bush v. Gore. As the chapter by Samuel Issacharoff and Richard H. Pildes argues in its examination of legal battles in Ohio: “Just as the 2000 election made all of us, including, unfortunately partisan legislatures, far more aware of how micro-manipulations of electoral rules might change outcomes, so too with the courts” (p. 220). The contributors to this volume were aware of the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 2013 case of Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that upheld the strict voter ID law in Indiana. But they were not aware of the 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that struck down the Voting Rights Act’s formula that required many jurisdictions to get prior approval for both “micro” and “macro” changes to election law.
Although the Supreme Court has abided by the governing opinion in Bush v. Gore that the case not be considered general precedent, Charles Anthony Smith’s chapter shows that federal and state courts nonetheless have been building on the case, mainly in the context of equal protection and voting technology. While the public’s memory about the case appears to be waning over time, the chapter by Amy Semet, Nathaniel Persily, and Stephen Ansolabehere shows that even a decade later, public attitudes about the decision remain polarized and affect more general views about the Court in a way that opinions about other cases do not.
Although the contributing authors managed to anticipate some important developments in election administration, there are some significant oversights. Some, such as the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration appointed in 2013 to deal with lines at the polls and other issues, could not have been foreseen. The most glaring omission in the volume is a treatment of provisional ballots. Provisionals, which are not even referenced in the index, were mandated by HAVA as a remedy for disputes that occurred at the polls in 2000. They have become more salient as states have passed strict voter identification laws. Provisionals delay vote counting and serve as fodder for many election-related lawsuits, a messy consequence of Bush v. Gore. Including a treatment of voter ID laws would have been one way to highlight this thorny issue. But this oversight should not take away from this valuable edited volume, which serves as a rich analysis of the contemporary era and an invitation to periodically revisit election practices and what scholars have learned about them.
