New Directions in Campaigns and Elections

Stephen K. Medvic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415878838
• eBook ISBN: 9781136980527
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Gouvernement américain

The ground upon which campaigns and elections are contested has been shifting rapidly in the last decade. Radical and ongoing changes to the way elections are administered and campaigns are financed; new approaches to polling, campaign management and advertising, and voter mobilization; and recent developments in the organization of political parties and interest groups, the operation of the media, and the behavior of voters require close examination. New Directions in Campaigns and Elections guides students through the tangle of recent developments in real-world politics drawing on the insights of innovative scholarship on these topics.

More than any other aspects of American politics, campaigns and elections have been affected—in many cases transformed—by new communication technologies, a recurring theme throughout the volume. This tightly organized collection of original contributions raises important normative questions, grounds students' thinking in cutting edge empirical research, and balances applied politics with scholarly insights. Like other volumes in the New Directions in American Politics series, the focused exploration of the latest developments across a comprehensive range of topics makes this an ideal companion for students eager to understand the rapidly changing political environment of the U.S. electoral process.

Chapter 1

Election Administration

Setting the Rules of the Game

Thad Hall and M. Kathleen Moore

The 2000 election brought to the fore questions about how we administer elections in America. Although there was a large focus immediately after the election on the rules governing vote-counting standards and on the technology used for voting—the “butterfly ballot” and punch card voting problems—it was immediately evident that the people who administer elections are also important. The face of Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida, became an immediate symbol of the conflicts that exist in the United States with election administration. Harris was both the official at the state level responsible for the implementation of elections in Florida and co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign. This conflict highlighted the fact that, in much of America, we govern our elections through partisan elected officials.

The Florida election debacle also illustrated that elections in the United States are highly delegated affairs. Voters vote in elections that are run not by state officials but by local election officials, and there are more than 10,000 such officials nationally. These officials are also often partisans who have specific political interests in election outcomes. They are often not full-time election officials; elections are but one of a panoply of activities that they administer in their jobs as county clerks, auditors, recorders, probate judges, and many other local government activities. These local election officials, in turn, generally delegate the implementation of Election Day voting activities to voting precincts, which are managed and run by poll workers—low-paid individuals who agree to work twelve or more hours on Election Day to implement the election procedures for 1000 or so voters in their community.

The delegation that is involved in running elections is extensive (Alvarez and Hall 2006). Between the federal government, the state election offices, local election officials, and polling places, elections require extensive coordination across multiple levels of government. This coordination is made more difficult because elections have a restrictive timeline. The implementation of early and absentee voting can lessen the volume of voters visiting the polls on Election Day. Conventional voting remains a single-day event; hiring a sizeable temporary workforce to run the Election Day activities and finding enough appropriate locations to hold the election in precincts in a jurisdiction presents a challenge. Election administration may be viewed in terms of nested principal–agent relationships: principals rely on agents that, in turn, rely on other agents. Statutory requirements, decentralized administrative structures, and elements of partisanship at all levels further complicate the adverse selection and moral hazard problems characteristic of principal–agent arrangements.

In this chapter we focus on this issue of election administration, considering how states delegate responsibility to local election officials and how these officials, in turn, delegate responsibility to poll workers in voting precincts. Finally, we examine the implications of these delegation decisions and how they affect the actual administration of elections in the United States. Our goal in this chapter is to illustrate the complexity of the administrative process and the implications of this complexity for the administrative process.

Federal and State Election Administration

As the National Commission on Federal Election Reform noted in its 2001 report, Congress has extensive powers to regulate elections under the Constitution (Carter and Ford 2002). The Voting Rights Act, laws governing voting by military and overseas civilians, and the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), all illustrate that Congress has such power. However, when Congress enacted HAVA, it did not create a strong role for the federal government in elections, even though it was within its authority to do so. As Karlan and Ortiz (2002) note, there are several clauses within the Constitution, in addition to several constitutional amendments, that provide Congress with power to govern elections. For example, the elections clause (Article I, Section 1) states that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections . . . shall be prescribed in each state . . . but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” As they note, the courts have ruled that Congress has comprehensive authority under this clause to regulate elections, including the ability to regulate the federal elections process and to create procedures that safeguard the right of eligible voters to vote. Congress may also use its spending powers and the commerce clause to regulate elections as well. The Voting Rights Act is an example of the strong federal involvement Congress can have in regulating how state and local governments administer elections.

HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which subsumed the role that the Office of Election Administration in the Federal Election Commission formerly held. The EAC “is intended to be the national clearinghouse of information on voting equipment, a resource to help states comply with new election standards, and a vehicle for compiling information and reviewing procedures” (Liebschutz and Palazzolo 2005: 508). However, HAVA explicitly did not confer power to the EAC to engage in rule-making or to pass requirements for uniformity across states. The EAC is primarily an advisory body that disburses grant funding provided for by Congress. This activity was especially important in the first years of the EAC, when it gave out funding to states for purchasing new voting technologies and for modernizing state voter registration databases.

The EAC has a four-member board that is nominated by the President, and then confirmed by the Senate, and a relatively small staff for carrying out its mandate. Initially, the EAC had a very difficult time getting its operations started owing to slowness on the part of Congress and the President in appointing members, and a slow start in getting staff online who could account for and distribute funding to the states for technology improvements in a timely manner (Montjoy and Chapin 2005). The agency has also been controversial among states, even though it has little power. At one point, the National Association of Secretaries of State urged Congress to dismantle the EAC entirely. As Elmendorf (2006: 428) has noted, the EAC lacks the basic rule-making powers needed to make reform: “The most straight-forward way of giving an independent agency a role in the development of election law is to authorize the body to implement open-textured standards through rulemaking.” The EAC has no such authorization; it can merely suggest reforms and offer guidance, as allowed by the restrictions in HAVA.

Instead, the locus of election law in the United States is at the state level. As Alvarez and Hall (2005, 559) note, “Part of the reason for this decentralized model of election administration is constitutional because Articles I and II of the U.S. Constitution largely delegate election procedures for federal offices to the states.” Even though the federal government expanded its role in election administration with the passage of HAVA, it still leaves much of the business of election administration in the hands of the states. This means that there remain wide variations in election administration in the United States. Election laws are different across states, and administrative rules and structures vary across many dimensions.

HAVA also illustrated another interesting aspect of election governance in the states, which is that states have historically delegated the role of election administration to the local and municipal levels. Although HAVA repeatedly uses the phrase “a state shall” in delineating the requirements for states under the law, states have, in many cases, pushed these requirements to the local level and not managed the implementation of the law centrally (Liebschutz and Palazzolo 2005). For example, HAVA requires states to have a state-wide voter registration database. Some states have created voter registration databases that are centrally administered at the state level but other states have merely linked together the county or municipally run voter registration systems and called the cobbled-together system a state-wide voter registration system.¹ In the first case the state is being pro-active and assuming the role of administrator as stated in HAVA (“the state shall . . .”) but in the second case the state is continuing the practice of allowing local governments to have control over the election process.

The list of differences in state election laws can be quite amazing to an outside observer (Keyssar 2000). Across the various states, voters use different voting technologies. States have different rules on who has to show identification at the polls. Some states allow voters to vote prior to the election in person in early voting but other states do not. Some states have liberal absentee voting rules and others have quite strict requirements. There are states with Election Day voter registration and states that allow voters to register to vote over the Internet. Most amazingly, the standards for what constitutes a valid vote on a ballot vary across states; what would be counted as a vote for a candidate in one state could go uncounted in another state. This discretion in how states run their elections means that the experience of a voter in the election process varies considerably across states.

This degree of variation in election administration may be viewed in a beneficial manner; local administration of elections and all the variation it entails is core to the American view of participatory government.

[L]ocal administration of elections can also enhance self-rule, particularly to the extent that it gives Americans more ownership of the voting process, more room for experimentation and innovation, and a structural way to minimize the effects of partisanship and error.

(Ewald 2009: 11)

The argument against sustaining this scale of variation is that it can serve to disenfranchise certain groups—that it exacerbates the effects of partisanship and error. Seemingly trivial administrative decisions can undermine voter confidence and discourage voters from voting even if the variety of decisions were all generated in response to a single statute. Variation in implementation can translate into variation in the rights of voters.

There are many questions that have arisen about the governance of elections at the state level because of the way in which election officials are chosen. In 33 states, there is a state-wide election official—typically the Secretary of State—who is elected through a partisan electoral process. Other states appoint a chief election official or an election commission that governs the administration of elections at the state level (Hasen 2005). Election problems in 2000 in Florida and in 2004 in Ohio illustrate the issues associated with accountability and delegation in elections at the state level. State legislatures typically delegate to the state’s Secretary of State or Lt. Governor the power to regulate elections at the state level. However, given that these state officials are often elected and are involved in politics themselves, this delegation can become controversial. In 2000, Florida’s Secretary of State “Katherine Harris quickly became a symbol for the idea that the very institutions designed to keep elected officials in check also depend on those same officials for oversight” (Nou 2009: 762). In short, the question was whether the fox was guarding the hen-house. The same questions arose in Ohio in 2004. There, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell came under scrutiny when election disputes arose and people questioned whether the state made administrative decisions based on partisan politics. Given that there is a normative ideal that elections will be free and fair, this partisan question is an important one.

Local Election Administration

Examining elections becomes more complex at the local level. With the exception of Hawaii where there is more state control, elections are administered at the local level. The locus of local administration varies across states. In some states, elections are run by counties and in other states elections are administered by municipal governments. Still other states use some combination of the two. These jurisdictions vary widely in their size and capacities to serve voters. In a national study of local election jurisdictions, Kimball et al. (2009) identified 10,370 local jurisdictions in the United States. They found that the median jurisdiction served slightly more than 1,000 voters in the 2004 presidential election. This means that half of all local election jurisdictions are small counties or small towns with very few voters. Considered from the perspective of the number of voters served, they found that approximately 64 percent of voters in the 2004 election lived in one of the 418 largest local election jurisdictions (4 percent of all election jurisdictions nationally).

These jurisdictions vary widely in their capacities for service and the demands asked of them. The smallest jurisdictions, on average, have a single polling place run by five poll workers that has about 350 voters on Election Day. By contrast, the largest jurisdictions serve on average almost 67,000 voters and manage over 750 poll workers, who work in approximately 94 voting precincts. These jurisdictions have very different budget and staffing levels. Small jurisdictions spend, for example, less than $250 on poll worker training, compared to $45,000 in larger jurisdictions (more than 50,000 voters). Surveys by Kimball et al. (2009) and Fischer and Coleman (2008) both find that smaller jurisdictions tend to be run by females who do not have a college degree. Individuals in the largest jurisdictions tend to be better educated and to belong to national professional election organizations. Individuals in smaller jurisdictions are also likely to serve in an array of positions as part of their job, being the elections person, as well as clerk, auditor, recorder, and other positions. Together, these factors suggest that there is a higher level of professionalism in larger jurisdictions related to election administration than there are in smaller jurisdictions.

Data also reveal that the majority of local election officials (LEOs) are elected officials, although some are appointed to their positions and possibly share power with an election board (Kimball and Kropf 2006). The fact that most LEOs are elected raises several important questions. The first is whether electing LEOs reflects the public’s preferences for how they should be chosen. In a national survey, Alvarez, Hall, and Llewellyn (2008) found that voters conceptually prefer to have their elections run by a board of individuals who are elected in a non-partisan manner. Voters and non-voters alike prefer power to be distributed among an election board instead of consolidated in a single position. The irony, of course, is that most LEOs are chosen in partisan elections and a single individual runs the elections.

Do differences in the partisanship of election officials actually affect the way in which elections are implemented? In several studies, scholars have found that partisanship does affect the implementation of key election policies and procedures. For example, prior to the 2000 election in Florida, the Secretary of State’s Office provided local election officials with a list of potential felons. Counties were to determine whether these individuals should, in fact, be purged from the voter rolls. There is evidence (Stuart 2004) that the purging of felons from the voter registration lists was implemented in a partisan manner; Republican election officials implemented the purge quickly and with little research into whether the felon matches were accurate, and Democratic election officials were slow to implement the purge.

There is evidence that partisan election officials also implement some laws differently depending on the way in which implementation will affect partisan outcomes. The clearest example of this is the area of provisional voting, where Kimball, Kropf, and Battles (2006) found that cross-pressured partisan election officials—a Democratic (Republican) official in a strong Republican (Democratic) jurisdiction—were less likely to count provisional ballots than were partisan election officials in districts that had a partisan leaning which mirrored their own. This variation in approach is “a direct result of Congress’s decision not to spell out clearly the requirements for provisional voting, but instead to leave implementation details to the states” (Tokaji 2005: 1228).

Partisanship has also been found to affect other aspects of election administration. Burden et al. (2010) found that, in Wisconsin, jurisdictions with an elected election official had higher turnout compared to jurisdictions with an appointed election official. They argue that elected election officials have more of a customer service focus in their work, meaning that they want more “customers” (i.e., voters) to participate in the “service” (i.e., elections). By contrast, appointed election officials tend to focus on issues of efficiency and economy, which means providing a baseline service at the lowest cost possible.

These views about service also play out in their attitudes toward election reform. Several studies (e.g., Burden et al. 2010; Kimball et al. 2010) have found that elected clerks tend to be more supportive of election reforms than are appointed clerks. For example, Burden et al. (2010) found that elected clerks in Wisconsin were more supportive of Election Day voter registration (EDR), more supportive of absentee voting, and less concerned about the administrative burdens of expanding either EDR or absentee voting. Kimball and Baybeck (2010) also find that attitudes toward reform are shaped by the partisanship of the election official, even if that partisanship differs from the underlying partisanship of the district they represent. Therefore, we see that partisanship of election officials affects the way in which people vote, the reforms that are supported, and the experience voters have on Election Day.

Poll Workers: The Street-level Bureaucrats of Elections

The place where election administration is most important and prominent in the voting process is at the actual time of voting, when voters interact with poll workers. Prior to the 2000 elections, little consideration had been given to the role of poll workers in elections and it was not until after the 2004 elections that these workers were studied systematically. The poll worker is the person who makes elections actually run in the approximately 100,000 polling places nationally. The ability of local election officials to monitor these polling places on Election Day, especially in medium-sized and large cities, is made difficult by the number of precincts that may exist in any given jurisdiction. At the extreme end of the scale, Los Angeles County, California has almost 5,000 precincts that it operates on Election Day but even an average large election jurisdiction has almost 100 polling locations open on Election Day. Whether or not these precincts are effectively run can at best be monitored passively; most counties do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Election Administration: Setting the Rules of the Game
• Chapter 2: Campaign Finance: Adapting to a Changing Regulatory Environment
• Chapter 3: Polling: Innovations In Survey Research
• Chapter 4: Campaign Management and Organization: The Use and Impact of Information and Communication Technology
• Chapter 5: Campaign Advertising: Reassessing the Impact of Campaign Ads On Political Behavior
• Chapter 6: Voter Mobilization: The Scientific Investigation of Getting the Electorate to the Polls
• Chapter 7: Political Parties: The Tensions Between Unified Party Images and Localism
• Chapter 8: Interest Groups: Back to Basic Questions
• Chapter 9: Media: The Complex Interplay of Old and New Forms
• Chapter 10: Voting Behavior: Traditional Paradigms and Contemporary Challenges
• Chapter 11: Congressional Elections: Why Some Incumbent Candidates Lose
• Chapter 12: Presidential Elections: Campaigning Within a Segmented Electorate
• Chapter 13: State and Local Elections: The Unique Character of Sub-National Contests
• Chapter 14: Election Reform: What Is Expected, and What Results?
• Bibliography