The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It
Heather K. Gerken
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0691154376
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Despite howls for reform, the only thing separating us from another election disaster of the kind that hit Florida in 2000, and that almost struck again in Ohio in 2004, may simply be another close vote. In this lucid and lively book, Heather Gerken diagnoses what is wrong with our elections and proposes a radically new and simple solution: a Democracy Index that would rate the performance of state and local election systems. A rough equivalent to the U.S. News and World Report ranking of colleges and universities, the Index would focus on problems that matter to all voters: How long does it take to vote? How many ballots get discarded? How often do voting machines break down? And it should work for a simple reason: no one wants to be at the bottom of the list.
For a process that is supposed to be all about counting, U.S. elections yield few reliable numbers about anything--least of all how well the voting system is managed. The Democracy Index would change this with a blueprint for quantifying election performance and reform results, replacing anecdotes and rhetoric with hard data and verifiable outcomes. A fresh vision of reform, this book shows how to drive improvements by creating incentives for politicians, parties, and election officials to join the cause of change and to come up with creative solutions--all without Congress issuing a single regulation.
In clear and energetic terms, The Democracy Index explains how to realize the full potential of the Index while avoiding potential pitfalls. Election reform will never be the same again.
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The question is what we should do in the meantime. At a minimum, early versions of the Index will have to rely on proxies to measure election performance. Sometimes that means using subjective measures or policy inputs. Sometimes we will have to measure pieces of the problem because we cannot assess the whole. Sometimes the data will be so flawed that we’ll have to drop a metric until better data are found. As designers of other indices will attest, pragmatism is the key. “Don’t let the perfect.
Accompany the Index should clearly explain the normative and methodological choices that were made in assembling the it. All of the data should be publicly available, and the mechanism for aggregating the data should be transparent. Ideally, the materials accompanying the Index should not only make the designers’ choices clear, but show how those choices affected the ranking themselves. One way to do that is to show how a different choice would affect the rankings. Take, for instance, the.
11. Carter-Baker Commission, Building Confidence in U.S. Elections, 54. 12. Eric A. Fischer and Kevin J. Coleman, Election Reform and Local Election Officials: Results of Two National Surveys, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, RL-34363, February 7, 2008. 13. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/elections/2004/ for state-by-state election results for 2004 presidential race. 14. Richard Lacayo, “Eye of the Storm,” Time, November 20, 2000. 15. See, e.g., Timothy.
Gerken, Thad Hall, Michael Kang, Justin Levitt, Ben Sachs, David Schleicher, Dan Tokaji, three anonymous reviewers, and my editor at Princeton, Chuck Myers, and copy editor Richard Isomaki. Over the course of the last eighteen months, I have also received helpful comments from Ian Ayres, Kim Brace, Richard Brooks, Kareem Crayton, Chris Elmendorf, Dan Esty, Deborah Goldberg, Rick Hasen, Steve Huefner, Christine Jolls, Katerina Linos, Jerry Mashaw, Michael McDonald, Rick Pildes, Charles Stewart,.
Semisovereign People; Key; The Responsible Electorate; Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972). 42. One could, of course, make an argument like this about most “latent” reform platforms that are amenable to effective framing. But few issues are as closely linked to partisan politics as this one. We are already waging political battles in which the Index could be used as a partisan weapon. 43.