First Principles of Election Administration

Mitchell Brown, Curtis O. Liles III Endowed Professor, Political Science, and Kathleen Hale, Professor and Election Administration Program Director, Political Science, Auburn University

Many of the essays “Constitutional Conversations” has published in our series on “Federalism and Elections” make the case for a stronger national role in elections administration. Mitchell Brown and Kathleen Hale argue in this week’s contribution to the exchange of ideas that local administration is stronger and more responsive in a positive manner to the needs of their jurisdiction: Brown and Hale “make the case here that US elections are fundamentally a good government story and, while some reforms are needed in some places, election administration should remain largely in the control of local governments.”

Local election offices play a critical role in meeting the changing needs of voters and pushing practice and procedures to increase accuracy and efficiency while managing costs. The ability of election officials to do this well depends upon myriad factors, primarily needs and demands in local areas from the electorate, the political context in which they operate, the resources available to them, and the professionalization and capacity of staff¹. Success at the local level is a reflection of and has implications for intergovernmental arrangements and power distribution in decision-making and authority for election administration. 

For the most part, elections in the US are a local government function. Although the federal role has grown through congressional actions such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), and the state role has grown because of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2022 (HAVA), the election function remains uniquely local. In recent years, conversation about a stronger national role in election administration has gained purchase as a method of resolving myriad concerns (some real and some imagined). 

We make the case here that US elections are fundamentally a good government story and, while some reforms are needed in some places, election administration should remain largely in the control of local governments. We start with what we know about quality practice and innovation and then make suggestions about how to theoretically approach analysis of United States (US) election performance and consider reform proposals.

Quality Practice and Innovation

We have worked directly with election officials for over a decade through the training program Auburn has in partnership with the Election Center, also known as the National Association of Election Officials. Through this partnership we have had the opportunity to engage with many hundreds of election officials from around the country and the opportunity to visit their offices both during and between elections. During the 2016 election, a narrative developed in the media that elections in the US were broken. This narrative ran counter to our experiences working with election officials, and, in fact, we were sure that not only were election officials doing their jobs well, but the best ones were figuring out how to do it better all the time. 

As a result, we embarked on a journey that took us around the country talking with election officials and looking at their offices that culminated in 2020 with a book, How We Vote that we published with Georgetown University Press which focused on innovation in election administration. We spent several years in the field collecting data across the country– interviewing election officials, conducting focus groups, surveying stakeholders, observing election offices and political processes, as well collecting other archival and secondary data to analyze. As we did this work, we sat at Kathleen’s kitchen counter and reviewed our notes and experiences and reflected a great deal on what we were seeing. 

There we developed our innovation theory of change, lifting up big concepts about how public services are delivered in the context of federalism. The environment requires cooperation, collaboration, and governance. As do the characteristics of the system generally - complexity, interdependence, accountability, and politics. And added to all of this, we need to be able to measure change, and determine something about success or failure. 

“The 2020 election reinforced the idea that election administration itself is not the problem and that it is still a story of good government.”

We modeled innovation and change as a function of demands on the system and local needs, resource availability (which is more than just money but it is critical), professionalization and capacity, and politics (partisanship but also political forces more broadly). In the face of changing or emerging needs, highly professionalized local election offices with moderate (or better) resources and administrative discretion are able to innovate to make elections more accessible, more efficient, more accurate, and more responsive. Jurisdictions that lack those things are still able to do a good job, but they are limited in their ability to innovate. Even the most cursory review of the evolution of how elections are administered in the country is a story of adaptation and innovation to uphold values, or principles, around accuracy, access, efficiency, and responsiveness to changing technology and to local needs. And much of what we learned guided us to an understanding that nationalizing elections is a sub-optimal policy solution. 

Needs One of the things that policy scholars observed from studying Aid To Families with Dependent Children (AFDC ) waivers is that a danger of a top-down system is that even when national controls are relaxed in order to encourage innovation, states and localities nonetheless tend to respond to national cues and not local needs.² In the current environment, this is likely to be even more true. 

Parties The 2020 election reinforced the idea that election administration itself is not the problem and that it is still a story of good government. In our research, we found that politics stymied innovation in some cases – which is not surprising. We also found that the political environment also supported and fostered what we see as some of the most innovative aspects of the modern election system—this is particularly true with the funding model that Colorado has developed, the genesis and evolution of Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) in Los Angeles County, California, and so on.

One aspect of the threat we face today comes from party leadership. Political parties are private groups designed to control government by having their members elected to office. The principle that seems to be guiding party strategy right now is power for power’s sake and winning at all costs, rather than more fundamentally American principles, such as democracy and equality. 

Political Competition One of the current threads in electoral reform conversations today is that we should borrow from other democratic systems around the world and adopt an independent (and more centralized) Electoral Management Board (EMB) approach. EMBs are not some magical panacea—the officials that lead EMBs come from somewhere, and that somewhere often has political roots. We shouldn’t be afraid of politics and political competition because it is inherent in the idea of democracy and democratic competition. Some years ago, we developed a professionalization index that we have applied in presidential election years to look at how professionalized election administration is across the states and how well that correlates with other factors.  We have also been refining the instrument for the local level to gauge capacity. States with non-partisan appointed chief election officials fare no better or worse than the states that choose election officials by election or through bi-partisan boards, suggesting that calls for EMBs, even if truly independent ones are possible, will not necessarily generate improvements.

Resources and Professionalization/Capacity Other factors we need to consider are resources, costs, and financing. These dimensions are also intricately tied into conversations about professionalization and organizational capacity. Teasing out both costs and financing of elections in the US is extraordinarily difficult. We attempted to do this a few years ago and used data from counties in 10 states to look at the ratio of election budgets to the overall county budget. We found a great deal of variance, but the average budget size was 0.5% of the county budget. While there has been some federal funding directed toward elections (primarily from HAVA funds, or to support electronic security or pandemic relief), and while some jurisdictions have everything they need to do their jobs well, this is not the case for many, if not most, election jurisdictions. 

There is an adage that is used a lot on social media in the election administration space, that elections can be fast, cheap, and accurate, but you can’t have them all at the same time. As a default in this country, and in part because of how we fund elections, we have settled on cheap as a constant for most jurisdictions in the country (because, as we all know, not making a decision is still making a decision). Cheap as a principle means that we are fundamentally ensuring that in order to be accurate we must be slow, but as a consequence of that slowness we are unintentionally feeding public apprehension about accuracy. This slowness – that is necessary for accuracy – is also at odds with our national appetite for “fast” in terms of when the media can call the horse race. 

Wonderful, civic-minded people choose to go into elections. When we lead with cheap as a principle it becomes hard to develop these people. Somehow, many jurisdictions have managed to support and develop their workforce nonetheless. But when additional pressures are added to the system, such as those we have seen in the last several years (i.e., foreign interference, threatening election officials, and impugning the integrity of the work through the media and courts), we also risk losing leadership in the field and bleeding expertise. 

First Principles

Changes made to the election administration landscape, including rule making authority, should be guided by adherence to first principles—those essential values that serve as the underpinnings of society and government. It would be ideal if we had universal agreement on our collective first principles; in practice, beliefs about what those first principles should be are often a reflection of which stakeholder group someone is in. In our work with election officials across the country, we note some general patterns (though there are, of course, exceptions)³. Election officials focus primarily on adherence to law, accuracy, timeliness, efficiency, responsiveness to voter needs, and neutral competence. 

When we look at other stakeholders in the election space, first principles differ. Parties and candidates focus on power, which necessitates winning. This means their focus is often on how to increase vote share, and embedded in this is competitive edge and access, ease, and responsiveness to needs of potential voters. When they focus on elections and how they are run, citizens tend to focus their attention and desires on a combination of access, convenience, and confidence in the outcome, though the tenor associated with their priorities often reflect the current narrative where their ideological commitments are aligned, which frequently overlaps with party affiliation. 

The Institutional Lens If we look at the same issue from an institutional lens, the first principles that shape the legal framework that constructs the intergovernmental arrangements and disagreements differ slightly. From the perspective of the Constitution (and therefore to an extent the Founders), these principles lift up local authority outside of timing and eligibility for national offices and eligibility to qualify as a voter, and of course eligibility to qualify as a voter has evolved over time.⁴ The major modern congressional alterations that impact the election landscape have occurred over the last 60 years, notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and its reauthorizations, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), the Help America Vote Act of 2022 (HAVA), and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986 (UOCAVA) and the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act of 2009 (MOVE) combined suggest a national focus on access, equity, and accuracy for all eligible citizens. ⁵

The principles upheld by the courts in recent history, however, reflect a more complex and nuanced narrative. National authority exercised through the courts has been more perplexing than useful in practice. The consequences of the Marion County (2008) and Shelby (2013) decisions make clear the role of Congress—and Congressional inaction suggests that the promise of the VRA remains unfulfilled. The national judiciary has waded into the political thicket of state decisions about drawing district lines but the results have left states without clear guidance or rationale. Recent advocacy for a national imprimatur on the unrivaled independence of state legislatures in deciding questions about election administration suggests contempt for voters and local election officials—but also for state courts and governors and other state institutions. These themes are not easily reconciled without profound implications for party and power politics.  And these themes ignore the realities of election administration. 

Moving Forward

Within this context, it remains the case that local election officials conduct elections in most places around the country. Most of the important innovations in election rules and administration today exist because localities were able to identify needs of local voters, had the leadership to push a change, had resources to support the change, and were located in states where state leadership either did not get in the way of experimenting or actively supported the ability of local offices to try. Examples abound throughout the history of our country, and some of the most critical over time include the advent of women’s suffrage, the adoption of the Australian ballot, the use of tabulators, the creation of vote centers, and the use of ePollbooks/Pollpads, among others. The best ideas diffused to other states, typically regionally first and then to other places as they addressed needs in those places. 

Inherent in each of these four drivers of innovation is the capacity of local offices to: 1) recognize needs, 2) develop solutions, 3) leverage resources, 4) work with stakeholders to overcome any barriers, including political and legal barriers, and 5) successfully implement their plan. The increasingly powerful role of state election officials can be seen as a positive improvement when that office’s function is to enhance communication and information sharing among local offices, support local offices through training and professional development, and increase resources that local offices can access to improve their work. But top down, command-and-control models of election administration from states (or theoretically from some kind of national EMB) naturally stifle improvement and innovation and lead to stagnation. And although this approach may lead to uniform processes and the opportunity for relatively routine legal compliance, it does not allow for innovation or positive changes for processing or efficiencies. On the other hand, states that support local offices to respond to local needs are also capable of producing uniform processes and maintaining legal compliance while also simultaneously working to improve and provide more responsive public service. 

Election administration today is a good government story, but it is under extraordinary pressure, and that has implications for the quality of American democracy. The system as a whole is typically underfunded, and in some places has been manipulated in an attempt to lift up party priorities and power over constitutional principles. Attempts to weaponize the system itself to achieve competitive edge should be anathema and not politics-as-usual. We should lead from first principles that support accuracy, access, and innovation. Local election offices demonstrate time and again that they are capable in this regard when professionalization can flourish and when political forces are wielded to garner resources. Adherence to a collection of first principles that support local efforts by building local election office capacity will go a long way in fostering continued success. 

1. Hale, Kathleen and Mitchell Brown. 2020. How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

2.  See for example the conclusions drawn in Liberman, Robert C. and Greg M. Shaw. 2000. “Looking Inward, Looking Outward: The Politics of State Welfare Innovation under Devolution.” Political Research Quarterly. 53(2): 215-240.

3.  Hale, Kathleen and Mitchell Brown. 2020. How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

4. Hale, Kathleen; Robert Montjoy; and Mitchell Brown. 2015. Administering Elections: How American Elections Work. Palgrave Macmillan.

5. Ibid.