Lets Rank States Like Colleges

Democracy is alive and well in the United States, at least when there is no incumbent running for reelection and voters have a choice between two clear alternatives (witness the recent closely-contested House election in upstate New York). Partisans of all persuasions are dissatisfied with the process, in particular how votes are counted. Democrats still remember Florida 2000, when George W. Bush won the majority of the votes counted, even though analyses accounting for overvotes and the notorious "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County showed that tens of thousands more voters in the state were intending to vote for Al Gore. The memory of this carried over to 2004, when more questionable claims were made about Ohio's vote count. On the other side, Republicans have expressed concern about ballot fraud dating back to the old-style big-city political "machines." And, of course, supporters of third parties of left, right, and center struggle against restrictive ballot laws and the difficulties of state-by-state registration for national campaigns.

In a new book, "The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How To Fix It," Yale law professor Heather Gerken reviews the problems of our election systems and suggests an intriguing way to improve things: as she puts it,

We should create a Democracy Index that ranks states and localities based on election performance. The Index would function as the rough equivalent of the U.S. News and World Report rankings for colleges . . . It would focus on issues that matter to all voters: how long did you spend in line? How many ballots were discarded? How often did voting machines break down? The Index would tell voters not only whether things are working in their own state, but how their state compares to its neighbors.

Heather Gerken worked on Barack Obama's campaign team, and unsurprisingly her suggestions focus on issues of particular concern to many Democrats. That said, I think her idea could -- and should -- be of interest to Republicans as well. Americans of all political persuasions have an interest in our major institutions -- including business, the military, education, the news media and, yes, government too -- retaining the confidence of the people.

What makes Gerken's proposal particularly appealing is its feature of using open sharing of information to create incentives for states and localities to improve their electoral systems, by setting up specific targets that voters can follow.

I like her idea -- a lot -- and just have a couple of concerns and suggestions.

First, as noted above, Gerken compares her proposed ratings to the U.S. News rankings of colleges. She immediately disassociates herself from the particulars of the U.S. News rankings -- which are notorious for being "gamed" by colleges, for example by manipulating early admissions -- but this brings to mind another problem, which is that rankings probably won't change much from year to year. I would've liked to see a ranking of the 50 states based on their current voting systems. Illinois and Ohio aside, would the traditional good-government metric of "closeness to Canada" be a good predictor? I can see why Gerken didn't include such a ranking in her book -- if you're trying to sell a new idea to the nation, it doesn't make sense to start off by disparaging the 25 states that would be on the bottom half of such a list -- but a baseline would've given me more of a sense of what the ratings would mean.

My second suggestion to Gerken and fellow reformers is that they broaden their list of concerns. On page 123, Gerken writes that the numbers in the index should "evaluate whether (1) every eligible voter who wants to register can do so, (2) every registered voter who wants to cast a ballot can do so, and (3) every ballot cast is counted properly." One thing she does not mention here is voter fraud. According to my Barnard College colleague and urban politics scholar Lorraine Minnite, "voter fraud is extremely rare"; nonetheless, fraud is certainly a real political concern. In her report, Minnite writes that "Better data collection and election administration will improve the public discussion of voter fraud and lead to more appropriate policies," and so it would seem to be a win-win policy to include some measure of voter fraud in the Democracy Index.

In summary, Gerken's proposals are interesting and appealing, and I hope that the fact that they come from a member of the Obama campaign team does not stop Republicans from taking her ideas, adding to them, and working with Democrats and supporters of minor parties (who might very well have their own reasonable additions to the Democracy Index) to set up a system in which the flaws of state and local election systems are made public in a nonpartisan way that would encourage innovation and improvement.