Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 2:00 pm--3:30 pm
The Brookings Institution, Falk Auditorium
1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC

To read a transcript of the event, go here (PDF).

The 2000 presidential election debacle focused public attention on our increasingly dysfunctional electoral system. Nearly a decade later, widespread problems remain despite a wealth of proposed solutions, an eager reform community, and significant public support for more smoothly-run elections. Yale Law School’s Heather Gerken offers a solution in The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It (Princeton University Press, 2008)--an index to rank states and localities based on how well they run their election systems on issues like wait times to vote and frequency of voting machine breakdowns.

On April 7, the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project, in cooperation with Yale Law School, hosted a discussion with Gerken. Thomas Mann, co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and Brookings senior fellow, moderated a panel featuring Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, and Norman Ornstein, co-director of the Election Reform Project and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Introduction and Moderator
Thomas Mann
Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Co-Director, AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project

Featured Speaker
Heather Gerken
J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Featured Panelists
Harold Koh
Dean and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law Yale Law School

Norman J. Ornstein
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project