The Party Line

The rise of non-precinct place voting ¹ has been one of the most significant changes in American elections of the past quarter century. Fifteen years ago, in the 1996 presidential election, roughly ten percent of all ballots were cast early in-person or absentee. ² In 2008, the Associated Press estimated that more than forty-four million ballots, or 34% of total ballots cast, were cast before Election Day.

The rapid adoption of new modes of voting caught many scholars and election officials by surprise, although it probably should not have. California, Oregon, Washington had all adopted no-excuse absentee balloting by 1980, while Texas allowed in-person early voting in 1988. Since 2000, the number of states allowing some sort of non-precinct voting, and the number of voters turning to these options, has grown sufficiently that everyone has taken notice.

We are pleased in this issue of Election Law Journal to publish articles from a symposium entitled “Time Shifting the Vote: The Quiet Revolution in American Elections.” The title of the symposium was taken from a conference organized by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in October 2009, and funded by the Pew Center on the States. ³ One article from that symposium, by Nathan Monroe and Dari Sylvester, was published in Election Law Journal, Volume 10, Number 1. Other articles from the conference appear in this issue.

The goal of the conference was to bring together nationally known researchers and election administrators to consider what lessons may be drawn from the first decade of sustained scholarly attention to non-precinct voting. That includes understanding how and why non-precinct voting has grown since 2000, and what the future might hold. These articles represent the very best work being conducted in political science and we are pleased to include them in the Journal. As legislators and policymakers move down the path of reforming current practices and procedures, we hope these articles will provide useful guideposts. As scholars study how the move toward non-precinct voting may alter campaign spending, voter turnout, and election outcomes, we hope these articles will serve as exemplars for their research.

The first article in the symposium is from a team of researchers affiliated with the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (Mike Alvarez, Thad Hall, Ines Levin, and Charles Stewart), and provides an overview of public reactions to election reform. They find that American support for many reforms is mixed at best. Support or opposition to reform is strongly conditioned on political affiliations and attitudes. In short, election reform is highly political—a lesson many elected officials learned long ago.

The next two articles draw on unique surveys of local election officials—one in Wisconsin and the second in Georgia—to help us understand the key role that local election officials play in the implementation of state election laws. Drawing on Michael Lipsky's classic study of “street level bureaucracy,” the Wisconsin team (Barry Burden, David Canon, Ken Mayer, and Donald Moynihan) demonstrates that proponents of reform will have to contend with local officials' view that election day voting is a civic responsibility—at least in that state. The Georgia team (M.V. Hood and Charles Bullock) takes a different approach. They focus on election officials as “producers” in the election system, contrasting their study with those that focus on “consumers” (voters). Professors Hood and Bullock find that outreach and advertising by local election officials can substantially increase the proportion of registered voters who vote early. The strikingly different attitudes toward reform among Wisconsin and Georgia election officials illustrate the complex quilt that constitutes America's highly decentralized elections system.

The next article, by Elizabeth Bergman and Philip Yates, is one of a series of recent pieces (including Monroe and Sylvester's article in our last issue) that take advantage of the “natural experiment” in which California allowed local officials to require voting by mail in small precincts. Professors Bergman and Yates find that “forced” vote by mail decreases overall turnout but that, consistent with the Georgia study, election officials can offset these negative effects with sufficient voter outreach.

The final article in the symposium is the first of a two-part article by Ned Foley on the disputed 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. That election ultimately turned on a legal dispute over the counting of absentee ballots, which dragged on for months. Among the many important questions to emerge from Minnesota's experience are whether absentee ballots are a point of vulnerability, as some have argued, and whether a carefully written set of rules and procedures may allow a decision accepted as legitimate by both sides. Regardless of how one feels about the final result, there is no doubt that Professor Foley's careful and thorough analysis will serve as the authoritative account of the legal controversy, including the tactics of both sides and the rationale for the various court decisions that ultimately resolved the election.

In addition to the symposium articles, this issue includes Richard Esenberg's preview of McComish v. Bennett, which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 28, 2011. The case involves a constitutional challenge to Arizona's public financing scheme, and Professor Esenberg considers whether the case will be the death knell for this mode of campaign finance reform. This issue also includes three book reviews. Ray La Raja reviews Melissa M. Smith, Glenda C. Williams, Larry Powell, and Gary A. Copeland's Campaign Finance Reform: The Political Shell Game; Doug Chapin reviews the revised edition of Alexander Keyssar's The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States; and Louis DeSipio reviews James Tucker's The Battle Over Bilingual Ballots: Language Minorities and Political Access Under the Voting Rights Act.