Since it's become my role to inform the community about Sen. Obama's election reform bills, I ought to note the Voter Advocate and Democracy Index Act of 2007, introduced yesterday in the Senate.
The bill is based directly on a Legal Times article by YLS (ugh) election law professor Heather Gerken, who argues that what we really need to drive election reform is more data:
Every other mature democracy relies on politically insulated bureaucrats to run its elections. In the United States, we depend on partisans, who have no vested interest in reforming our troubled electoral system. These politicians don’t want to give up one of their most important weapons: the ability to manipulate the rules to help their friends and hurt their enemies. The foxes are guarding the electoral henhouse.
At the same time, grass-roots reform has failed to gain traction. Despite deep dissatisfaction among voters about the current state of affairs, bread-and-butter reforms -— involving the details of counting ballots, jargon-filled evaluations of election machinery, nitty-gritty registration requirements -— are so arcane that even political junkies can rarely stomach them. And when election problems do become visible, the fight between reformers and local officials quickly descends into debates that voters have no yardstick for judging. Who, after all, has strongly held intuitions about what kind of voting machine is better or how provisional ballots should be verified?
What we need is a national ranking system for state election-law practices -— call it a Democracy Index.
This index should take what Ohio State University law professor Daniel Tokaji calls a "moneyball approach." The word "moneyball," of course, refers to Michael Lewis’ book of the same name about the success of the Oakland A’s after management substituted hard numbers and empirical research for the gut-level judgments of baseball scouts in making hiring decisions.
Similarly, the Democracy Index could change the terms of the debate by giving voters something new: moneyball politics. It would offer cold, hard numbers and comparative data in place of atmospherics and anecdotes. It would provide bottom-line results in place of subjective judgments. It would let reformers talk like corporate executives, not starry-eyed idealists. And, most important, it would enable the voters to hold election officials accountable for their missteps.
And that's what the Obama bill requires. According to his press release (and the bill itself, of course), it would create an Office of the Voter Advocate within the Election Assistance Commission, to set up a program to require the states to report on basic performance metrics such as:
- The amount of time spent by voters waiting in line;
- The number of voters incorrectly directed to the wrong polling places;
- The rate of voter ballots discarded or not counted along with an explanation;
- Provisional voting rates and the percentage of provisional votes cast but not counted;
- The number and description of election day complaints; and
- The rate of voting system malfunctions and the time required on average to get the systems back online.
The bill itself doesn't require that the states do anything with this information, but it would make grants available to institute programs to improve performance, and make recommendations to the states on how to improve their performance in the administration of federal elections. And even without requiring change, just publishing the data would be enough, explains Prof. Gerken:
The Democracy Index would create an incentive for politicians to do the right thing. Consider, for instance, the fate of Ohio’s secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, who presided over a 2004 election that was chaotic, error-laden, and tainted by claims of partisan bias. Last year, Blackwell ran for governor (and lost). But imagine what his opponent could have done with hard numbers proving that Ohio had one of the worst-run election systems in the country. Other top election officials, even those rare ones without further political ambitions, would surely remember that campaign.
[Standard disclaimer: Sen. Obama was my professor for voting rights and election law back in 1996. You may choose to discount or extol my opinions on the topic accordingly.]