Jessica Leval, Research Assistant, AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project

April 1, 2009

In her recent book The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How to Fix It, Heather Gerken, J. Skelly Wright Professor at Yale Law School, lays out a compelling argument in favor of the creation of a "rough equivalent of the U.S. News and World Report rankings for college and graduate schools" applied to state and county-wide election systems. Gerken's "Democracy Index" would rank states and counties based on the effectiveness of their administration of elections. The Index would help create badly needed "consensus on best practices" in the area of election reform by measuring three key areas outlined by Gerken--"registration, balloting, [and] counting"--within each of the states.

In an engaging and easily accessible style, Gerken explains the many merits of such an Index. The study of election reform currently lacks hard, numerical data and, as a result, Gerken explains, election reform experts tend to overlook the need for statistical backings for their assertions. For instance, she describes how Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (PDF), the Supreme Court case upholding the voter identification requirement in Indiana, was decided without the use of any substantive, quantitative evidence. In a manner that typifies Gerken's compelling style, she compares today's election reform efforts to efforts of doctors trying to heal patients before the advent of modern medicine. She explains:

"Put differently, election reformers and policymakers today function a lot like doctors did in the old days. Based on limited information they have about the symptoms of the problem (lots of ballots are discarded, the lines seem long), they try to identify the underlying disease (is the problem badly trained poll workers? Malfunctioning machinery?). Like the doctors of yore, election reformers and administrators may even try one fix, followed by another, hoping that their educated guesses turn out to be correct. The problem is that their educated guesses are still just that - guesses."

Without uniform quantitative measures, Gerken explains that election administration will continue to suffer from the problem of "deferred maintenance." She explains that states constantly delay correcting problems with their election systems largely because of an overall "resistance to change" and a general "lack of professionalism" on the part of election administrators, but most importantly, because these issues are often invisible to politicians and the public. In general, after one election is concluded and until the next cycle begins, the issue of election reform simply vanishes from the public eye and is promptly cast aside to be dealt with on a later occasion.

While Gerken acknowledges that the Index would inevitably tend to oversimplify some of the underlying concerns, she argues that its overall utility would far outweigh this minor drawback. The Index would provide election reform researchers, politicians, and voters with hard data to facilitate greater understanding of the current problems in election administration. In addition, however, to highlighting specific areas where reforms are badly needed, the Democracy Index would grant election reform efforts greater public visibility, even during "off-peak" periods. Through the creation of artificial competition in which politicians and state officials would strive to raise their state rankings, the Index would provide a sustained focus on election administration issues and increase transparency for voters.

While Gerken does an excellent job of highlighting the current failures in election reform and describing her innovative proposal, her argument would perhaps have been more persuasive had she included some sample questions to begin the process of formulating the Index in a more concrete way. The idea of using numerical standards to measure performance is not a new one, as Gerken herself points out; we use measures in everything from the Poverty Index to the Environmental Performance Index to ranking colleges and graduate schools. The key to all of these efforts is developing well-formulated, uniform questions from which we can derive meaningful and useful data. While Gerken successfully tackles the political questions and practical methods for the overall creation of a Democracy Index, she provides only general topics with potential proxy measurements that are often slightly too amorphous to translate into specific questions to be included in such an Index.

Gerken acknowledges that we are currently far from making a successful Index a reality, but she does provide a thorough blueprint for significant improvements which would revolutionize the study of election reform by providing hard data in a field notorious for its lack thereof.

Jessica Leval can be reached at jessica.leval@aei.org.

Viewpoint is an occasional feature analyzing various election reform issues.