Gerken on Election 2008
posted by Danielle Citron
Heather Gerken has a terrific post on the Election Law Blog entitled The Invisible Election where she reflects on the administration of the 2008 Presidential election. As a member of Obama’s election protection team, Gerken helped monitor the problems seen in polling places across the country. She found that, contrary to the media’s message that we had a problem-free election and consistent with computer scientists and political scientists fears, election administration in some jurisdictions fell apart for reasons both technical and human. Thousands of people had to wait three hours or more to vote due to the limited number of voting machines or broken machines. Voters showed up to the polls thinking that they had registered to be told that they were not on the rolls. Poll workers did not know the basic rules about provisional ballots and election protocols. Although some jurisdictions administered election day with few hiccups, others did not. As Gerken suggests, we need to make the administrative side of elections visible to the public, policymakers, and election administrators themselves. To that end, Gerken would create a Democracy Index, which would rank states and localities based on how well they run elections. More data on how the election system actually performs would help us assess routine problems and provide insight on the problems that require funding to fix.
November 24, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law
Print This Post
Responses (3)
John Armstrong - November 24, 2008 at 3:55 pm
So what’s the map?
Danielle Citron - November 24, 2008 at 5:27 pm
That is the electoral map for 2008 according to Wikimedia Commons.
Maryland Conservatarian - November 24, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I deployed to Cleveland for the election and while there were problems (mis-use of provisionals being the most prevalent) from my perspective this was more a function of poll judge incompetence vice evil intentions (whether such incompetence is convienent is another story). But I have no doubt we’d hear screams of voter suppression were we to focus more on judge training…
Leave a Reply