Researching Electoral Administration in America: Insights from the ‘Post-Florida’ Era
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1478-9302.2010.00213.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S R E V I E W : 2 0 1 0 VO L 8 , 3 5 7 – 3 6 7
doi: 10.1111/j.1478-9302.2010.00213.x
Researching Electoral Administration in America:
Insights from the ‘Post-Florida’ erapsr_213357..367
Toby S. James
Swansea University
This article reviews four new additions to the growing literature on electoral administration. It argues that each book
adds usefully to the literature, but that there remains an absence of cross-national reflection. The books make
important contributions by highlighting the importance of electoral administration, which is often overlooked in
democracies; by making important normative contributions to the case for particular procedures; and by developing
a number of methodologies that may be of use to researchers and practitioners. They remain, however, based almost
exclusively on American elections, reflecting the bias of the broader literature. There is a need for a more
comparative approach to the study of electoral administration so that: (a) lessons from ‘overseas’ can be taken to the
US; (b) countries other than the US spend more time scrutinising the way in which they run elections; and (c) we
can test the existing research findings in new contexts to deepen our understanding of frequently overlooked
mechanics of electoral administration.
Cain, B. E., Donovan,T. and Tolbert, C. J. (2008) Democracy in the States: Experimentation in Election Reform.Washington
DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Alvarez, M., Hall,T. and Hyde, S. (eds) (2008) Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation.Washington
DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Overton, S. (2006) Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression. London: W. W. Norton and Company.
Piven, F. F., Minnite, L. and Groarke, M. (2009) Keeping Down the Black Vote. London: The New Press.
On the morning of Wednesday 8 November 2000, the world’s attention was on electoral
administration.The previous day, Al Gore had conceded the US presidential election based
on media network predictions, but subsequently withdrew his concession after networks
put Florida back into the ‘too close to call’ category.The initial count in Florida was won
by George W. Bush but Gore requested a manual recount in the four Democrat-
dominated counties of Broward, Miami-Dade, Volusia and Palm Beach, as permitted by
Florida state law. There then began a series of legal contests in both state and federal
courts which led to the final judgement in the Supreme Court that effectively gave the
election to Bush. During this time global media networks, politicians, citizens and
academics quickly became aware of a range of new concepts and terminology from the
field of electoral administration such as ‘hanging chads’, ‘butterfly ballots’ and ‘the clear
intent of voters’ (Ceaser and Busch, 2001; Pomper, 2001). The seemingly mundane
processes by which an individual could register and cast their vote, and the processes by
which this vote was counted, had suddenly been elevated into an enormous international
issue. Speaking in Nigeria in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to
identify with her audience by referring to America’s struggles with democracy. She
pointed out that the brother of President George W. Bush was governor of Florida at the
time of the election dispute, and implied that Bush’s 2000 ‘victory’ was illegitimate
© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association
358
TO B Y S. J A M E S
(Neuman, 2009).1 The election in 2000 certainly left a long-lasting bad taste in the mouth
of American democracy. It also demonstrated that electoral administration deserves sys-
tematic scrutiny by policy makers and academics.
Almost a decade on, electoral administration no longer holds the same popular attention
outside the US. However, while the 2000 US election was by no means the first time that
academics had written on the topic,2 it helped to spawn a plethora of literature on the
subject and it remained a contested political issue at both the state and federal levels as
politicians, political activists and civil servants prescribed changes to prevent ‘another
Florida’. Interest in American electoral administration therefore ripples on. This article
reviews four recent books on this particular aspect of elections from the US. The article
concludes that these make important contributions to the developing literature by
highlighting the importance of electoral administration in democracies, by making impor-
tant normative contributions to the case for particular procedures and by developing a
number of methodologies that may be of immediate use for researchers and practitioners
in improving the practice of elections. They remain, however, based almost exclusively on
American elections, reflecting the bias of the literature. There is a need for more
cross-national and comparative approaches to the study of electoral administration so that:
(a) lessons from ‘overseas’ can be taken to the US; (b) countries other than the US spend
more time scrutinising the way in which they run elections; and (c) we can test the
existing research findings in new contexts to deepen our understanding of frequently
overlooked mechanics of electoral administration.
Why Does Electoral Administration Matter?
Bruce E. Cain et al. open their book, Democracy in the States: Experimentation in Election
Reform (Cain et al., 2008), with a discussion of why electoral administration might be
important. For them, election reform3 might play a significant role in solving many of the
problems facing American democracy. What are these problems? Firstly, there is a high
degree of cynicism surrounding politics and elections. The authors note how the pro-
portion of Americans who felt that elections ‘make the government pay “a good deal” of
attention’ to what the people think has seen a historical decline – from 65 per cent in
1965 to 37 per cent in 1988. In addition most respondents to the 1990 American
National Election Study said that they did not care much about who won the congres-
sional elections.These figures have improved slightly, the authors suggest, but there are still
plenty of signs of a problem remaining. In 2004, the proportion of people ‘that did not
care much about the outcomes of congressional races was closer to one-third’. The
proportion of the electorate who said that elections made the government pay attention
in 2000 was roughly one-half (p. 2).
Secondly, America notoriously has one of the lowest turnout rates in the world. Citing
statistics from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the
authors suggest that when states are ordered by their average turnout since 1945, the US
tables at 139th out of 172.There is also enormous state-by-state variation with 61 per cent
of eligible citizens voting in 2006, but only 29 per cent of those in Mississippi (p. 6).
© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2010, 8(3)
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What is the cause of these problems? Cain et al. claim that the number of uncompetitive
elections and public concerns about the role of money in politics are important factors,
but that electoral administration matters too.Why? To begin with they note how evidence
from public surveys suggests that the American public have little confidence in the systems
used to administer elections around the country. A Pew Research Center survey from
2006 found that 32 per cent of unregistered voters had...
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