Creating a Level Playing Field in Election Administration : Are Election Officials Meeting Public Expectations?

Two measures of the quality of democratic elections are generally agreed to be the level of participation by eligible citizens and the fairness of the electoral process. Two thirds of voters in the US report that they want government to do more to make voting easier (Milyo, Konisky, and Richardson 2009). Civic and advocacy organizations echo the call for greater participation in American elections with numerous proposals of steps for the government to make voting easier. While they desire increased levels of participation, the public also wants government to ensure that elections are fair contests between the candidates free of bias, fraud, and error. The federalized system of elections places most of the burden of creating and maintaining a level playing field in elections with local election administrators. Despite this responsibility for the cornerstone of democratic governance, election administrators receive little attention from scholars or policymakers, except for intense scrutiny and usually harsh criticism when problems occur. We have been unable to identify any published systematic study of the impacts of decisions and actions by election administrators. This paper begins to fill that gap by looking at the relative priority that local election administrators place on encouraging participation and ensuring the fairness of elections. We seek to explain these patterns of prioritization by examining the resources local election administrators have available to achieve these goals. We report on the results of two rounds of surveys of County Clerk & Recorders in Colorado conducted before and after the 2008 General Election. The surveys focus on the Clerks priorities, resources, and promotional activities for the administration of the 2008 General Election