Executive Summary

Now that the turmoil of the disputed Presidential election is over, Washington is turning to the more sober task of reforming the system that allowed last November's election debacle. To bring the findings and contributions of social science to the policy community, COSSA sponsored a Congressional Briefing, The Mechanics of Election Reform: From Registration to Results March 16 on Capitol Hill.

"It is probably fair to say that most observers of American politics were caught flat-footed by the ballot counting controversy of the Presidential election last November," remarked Catherine Rudder, Executive Director of the American Political Science Association and Moderator for the event. Although elections are complex affairs, "we can do better," Rudder asserted. "The ultimate goal is to establish the legitimacy of electoral outcomes and hence the acceptance of those outcomes by winners and losers alike."

Making Reforms Effective

Election reform is not new; it is a virtually continuous feature of the American political process, noted Michael W. Traugott, Professor of Communication Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan. Research on the effectiveness of such reforms is also common. The research suggests that the two main goals of reform in election administration -- increasing the level of participation and making the participating electorate more reflective of the population -- have been only modestly successful, at best, said Traugott.

Turning to the research he and his colleagues have conducted, Traugott observed that most reforms seem to do better at retention (keeping people voting in elections) than at mobilization (bringing new voters into the electorate). As a result, reforms do not generally expand the electorate. Similarly, Traugott's research suggests that easing access to the ballot does not favor one party over another, as one common "lay theory" holds.

Although research on election reforms is not new, Traugott suggested some issues that were raised by the events in Florida for which we have little empirical evidence. For instance, we know little about how much confidence voters have that their choices will be registered or how such confidence can affect overall levels of trust in governments. Finally, Traugott observed that there are virtually no educational programs for voters, despite the fact that our society is highly mobile and people move between different voting systems. "What kind of educational programs would best serve election administrators, as well as voters who are interested in having their views represented?" Traugott posited.

The Importance of the Human Factor

David Woods, Professor in the Institute for Ergonomics at the Ohio State University, approached issues of the confusing butterfly ballot and the problematic punch cards from a human factors perspective. Rejecting the "blame game of either dumb users or poor design," Woods said "we have to look at the integrated system of people interacting with a device to . . . [register] their desires for how our political system should be governed."

Woods also rejected the tendency to portray such problems as the Florida count as unique and anomalous. "You learn from these things and you must set up systems to monitor and pick up the early warning signs where inaccuracies and impressions or systematic errors are creeping into our voting system," Woods advised.

Rather than seeing a solution in simply replacing antiquated technology, Woods emphasized the human-machine interactions. Two things are critical here, he said: "Give people feedback . . . so they can see the results of their actions,? and create a "visible audit trail," so that feedback is available from the entire voting and tallying process.

Improving the Voter-Machine Interface

The morning?s third speaker was Charles H. Stewart, III, Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Stewart echoed Woods in observing that the problems in Florida were perceived by most as simple failures of technology. When they realized that designing "the perfect voting machine" was silly, Stewart and his colleagues at MIT and Cal-Tech focused on two basic goals: assessing where we stand right now in terms of voting technology and election administration and articulating a set of principles to guide the design of voting and administrative systems, "so that everybody?s vote will count and everybody?s vote will count equally."

Their preliminary studies indicate that traditional voting technologies are associated with the lowest overall level of error; those associated with the highest degree of inaccuracies are the punch cards and, surprisingly to many, the new digital direct devices ? the ones that "around November, a lot of people . . . were rushing to adopt." This suggests not the move away from technology but the attention to human factors. "What we want to be able to do is articulate more precisely what it is about these electronic technologies that seem to lead voters astray," Stewart concluded.

Stewart and his colleagues hope to deliver by the end of the summer "the best thinking within various professions so that industry and policy makers and the like can make the sorts of decisions they need to make."

Expanding the Electorate

The final speaker was Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Professor of Community Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and Vice President for Research at the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute. De la Garza turned away from human-machine perspective of the other speakers to focus solely on the human side of the equation.

"The objective of a democratic electoral system," he began, "is to keep expanding the electorate until it really looks like the people." While the obstacles to voter registration prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are effectively gone, he said, the fundamental issues affecting access today are issues of class. De la Garza identified citizenship laws and felony laws as disenfranchising poor people disproportionately. For example, affluent people, he said, are less likely to go to prison for drug-related felonies than the poor.

Also having class impact, according to de la Garza, are the new campaign techniques, in which candidates target those who are most likely to vote anyway, who tend to be older, better educated, and more affluent. Such strategies are not likely to expand the electorate, he argued.

De la Garza also drew a distinction between registration and voting. Looking at Harris County in Texas (which contains Houston), he observed an explosion in registrants among Latinos, but a much less remarkable increase in actual voters. They are registered, but not mobilized ? "They don't feel connected in any way, shape, or form to the process," he lamented. De la Garza suggested adopting mobilizing techniques that the U.S. uses when it sponsors democracy abroad, such as voter celebrations that bring people together to vote in areas of low turnout.

The briefing was part of the Decade of Behavior (see Update, October 9, 2000) and was co-sponsored by the American Political Science Association and the American Psychological Association. A transcript will be available mid-May.  For a copy, contact Chris Ryan.