Abstract
Headlines decried the fragility of American democracy during the 2020 elections, but extensive institutional structures steered officials in both political parties to certify the results of the election, and independent judges have validated their decisions. Political battles over election laws and procedures are not themselves signs of democracy’s demise, because legal and administrative guardrails contain the degree to which voting rights are threatened. These formidable institutional structures blunted former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and limited the scope and impact of new state legislation to restrict access to voting. The guardrails of elections operated as designed, but Trump’s unfounded charges of fraud coupled with state restrictions are corroding the credibility and fairness of elections. We examine the scope and function of election law and administration to understand how they protected American democracy in the contentious 2020 election.
Searing news headlines spotlighted vulnerabilities in American democracy before and after the 2020 elections. Former president Donald Trump pressured secretaries of state and Department of Justice officials to block Joe Biden’s win by changing vote totals and support unfounded charges of election fraud. Roused to Trump’s cause, his backers threatened election officials, a number of whom retired early. Republican-controlled state governments proposed and passed changes to election law to aid their party’s future elections by discouraging voters of color and others who tend to support Democratic candidates.
The test of American democracy in 2020 was not simply that a renegade president strove to overturn his loss. What also stood out was the rigorous and extensive institutional structures that steered officials in both political parties to certify the results and independent judges to validate their decisions. Today’s struggles over election rules and procedures continue a pattern of conflict since the Republic’s founding with an important difference: they largely occur within the guardrails of legal jurisprudence related to voting and within an elaborate structure of election administration that consists of trained, mission-driven personnel and rule-based procedures. The apparatus of elections blunted Trump and conditions new state legislation. While 2020 did not spell the doom of American democracy, Trump’s charges did accelerate distrust in the fairness of elections and fuel partisan battles over state election laws. The 2020 election, therefore, may have created significant vulnerabilities for future elections, where partisanship is inserted into the largely nonpartisan mechanisms for election administration.
We use the 2020 General Election and its aftermath as a portal into the vulnerability and institutional resilience of election law and administration. We begin by situating election law and administration as an integral component of political representation before turning to the accomplishments of election officials in 2020. We then explore the damage caused by Trump and the risks of new election laws passed in Republican-controlled states and conclude with an agenda for revitalizing American democracy.
Political Representation, Election Administration, and Power
Stephen Skowronek’s (1982) pioneering study of administrative changes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries traces the struggle for institutional position and power as a driving force in the development of the large but “hapless” American state.
The fight for institutional position and political power has shaped political rights and election administration since the founding of the Republic. Race, class, and political expediency sparked intense political struggles that produced recurrent restrictions, expansions, and contractions of who votes, when, and under what conditions (Jacobs, forthcoming). Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Blacks were barred from voting and poor whites confronted property restrictions; Catholics and Jews also faced barriers.
Electoral competition during the first half of the nineteenth century prompted a relaxing of property restrictions on white men (Wilentz 2005; Keyssar 2009). Even as more white men in the North and West were enfranchised, Blacks, Indigenous, and people of color continued to be excluded in the South and severely limited in the North. Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and other New England states reversed the voting rights of Blacks by the 1830s. In the South, slave owners restricted white voting to blunt demands by both slaves and poor whites seeking economic redistribution. The Civil War carved a regional divide: the North’s outlawing of slavery coincided with widening the right to vote to Black men regardless of property, while the South continued its brutal oppression and voting restrictions.
World War I began a steady—though incomplete—march toward the formal guarantee of universal suffrage (Kessayar 2009, 179). Women won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, nearly doubling the size of the electorate. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, civil rights legislation, and a series of judicial decisions removed nearly all the formal restrictions on the franchise. Even after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013 ended the government’s review of election law changes (primarily by southern states) for their effects on citizens of color (Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, 2013), the law constrains contemporary efforts to roll back voting rights; and a formidable coalition of organizations go to court, pressure state and federal governments, and mobilize resistance to new restrictions on people of color.
Political competition remains the catalyzing force in the battle over voting. For years, this has been characterized as a battle between voting access and integrity. Those niceties were dropped during the Trump administration and since his reelection loss, as state legislators and attorneys representing the Trump campaign argued in favor of voting restrictions. During oral argument to the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2021, the lawyer representing Arizona’s Republican Party defended the state’s prohibition of “out-of-precinct” provisional ballots that were not cast in the voter’s designated polling place. Election administration is a “zero-sum game,” Michael Carvin candidly argued, and allowing “out-of-precinct” voting “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats”: “every extra vote . . . [is] the difference between winning an election 50 to 49 and losing.” In July 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Arizona’s law in the Brnovich case, finding that these restrictions amounted to a political question to be settled by elected officials (Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. --, 2021).
The political battle over election administration is propelling states controlled by Republicans and Democrats. Many of the twenty-three states where Republicans control the legislature and governorship countered the growing electoral power of Democrats and the steps by election administrators to expand access to the ballot box in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of Republicans in Arizona, their new election law responded to the growing power of Democrats, who hold both U.S. Senate seats and won the presidential race (Biden prevailed by a mere 0.3 percent, or 10,457 votes) and are within two seats of taking legislative majorities. The strategy of Arizona Republicans accommodated the legal guardrails in place: instead of diminishing voting rights and inviting a reversal, they targeted Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, and its policies to combat COVID-19. In particular, Republicans passed legislation to roll back the “vote anywhere” policy adopted by the Maricopa County Elections Department to “provide voters with increased access and reliability, while ensuring all locations are large enough to allow for physical distancing” (Maricopa County Elections Department 2020).
Democrats are also wielding the power—in many of the sixteen states they control—to propose and pass legislation to widen access to the ballot box (Crampton 2021). New York, New Jersey, and Virginia have approved automatic voter registration to welcome higher turnout by voters. New Jersey recently added online voter registration, including registration with a social security number. Vermont and Hawaii moved to all-mail voting. Washington and Colorado crafted policies to maximize Native American election participation. Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Colorado added hundreds of drop boxes to facilitate mail ballot voting.
Yet for each of these expansions in a Democratic-controlled state, ballot access contracted across similar policy areas in Republican-controlled states. Mail ballot access was curtailed in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. Kansas and Alaska added stricter signature requirements for mail ballot acceptance. New drop box restrictions were added in Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Election day registration was eliminated in Montana. Georgia and Iowa set limits on early voting days and hours (Brennan Center for Justice 2021).
The partisan altering of the rules and terms of election administration is not a cataclysmic step toward the collapse of American democracy. Parties struggling for power by altering election rules is an old story. After the 2020 elections, Republicans are pushing to roll back the access granted during the pandemic (along with other steps); Democrats are seeking to lock in or expand the changes introduced during 2020. Modern election law and administrative practice create limits, however, on how far voting rights can be changed.
The Miracle of 2020
The election administrator creed is, “May your election have high turnout and wide margins.” Unfortunately for election officials, only the first half of the creed held true in 2020. More people (nearly 160 million) voted than in any U.S. election—30 million more than in 2016. Not only was the total turnout higher than any previous election, but the two out of three eligible voters who cast a ballot was higher than any other federal election since 1900. This remarkable result was all the more impressive because the Coronavirus required election officials in every state, including those with vote-at-home models, to make wholesale changes in the administration of elections with unprecedented speed to make the casting of ballots easier and safer. States switched from polling place elections to early voting, from in person to vote by mail. Counties opened 24-hour voting centers, added mobile voting, and increased drop boxes for mail ballots. Where voters showed up to cast ballots in person, social distancing and personal protective equipment were adopted. While alarms were sounded about possible chaos and disruption, voters cast their ballots without incident.
These policy changes led to extraordinary increases in turnout. Hawaii added vote by mail and same-day registration. The state’s turnout increased 14.4 percent from 2016. Vermont sent every voter a mail ballot and New Jersey dramatically expanded vote by mail. Both states saw voter turnout increases of more than 8 percent from 2016 to 2020. Montana permitted each county to decide whether to send each voter a ballot—forty-six out of fifty-six opted for all mail. Turnout in Montana increased by 8.5 percent. Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington added same-day registration between the 2016 and 2020 election. Each saw turnout increases of between 4.7 and 8.6 percent (U.S. Election Assistance Commission 2021).
While Joe Biden won the election handily in total votes and the electoral college, close outcomes in a handful of U.S. states put the election in doubt for several days after election day. With that, the 2020 General Election had all the ingredients to create controversy: very close outcomes, intense partisan divisions, threats of foreign interference, and Donald Trump’s refusal to concede. The presidential contest was decided by fewer than forty-five thousand votes in the four closest states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin). Under normal circumstances, the results would have been scrutinized, with possible recounts and election contests. That was the case in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost three Midwest states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, by fewer than forty-five thousand votes as well. The difference was that Clinton conceded defeat in a televised speech the day after the election, some 26 hours after polls closed in the eastern time zone. By contrast, former President Trump launched unsupported charges of massive fraud that “stole” the election and never conceded the election.
The Institutional Capacity of Election Administration
American institutions are notoriously porous and susceptible to influence by well-organized interests (Lowi 1979; Skowronek 1982). Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold (1982) revealed, however, America’s “islands of state strength in an ocean of weakness” (p. 271). For instance, the national Social Security Administration efficiently calculates the eligibility and distinct benefits of individual Americans, collecting more than $1 trillion in payroll taxes and distributing those funds to more than 65 million people. Its skillful operations are akin to a well-run European social welfare program rather than the often-decentralized American programs, with their mingling of public and private agents. Recent developments have reported new “backsliding” in administrative capacity (Moynihan, this volume).
Election administration is one of those areas of institutional capacity and independence, positioning it to prevent fraud and contain political fighting over voting within legally circumscribed parameters. Its procedures are defined by routinized conduct, written rules specifying administration, and federal and state laws. The more than fifty thousand state and local official who work on elections are typically hired based on professional skills and assigned prescribed roles. The core functions of election administration are highly prescribed—from registration and voting by mail or in person to ballot tabulation, postelection audits, and security. They provide the institutional backbone for the rules and procedures of democracy (Urbinati 2012; Saffon and Urbinati 2013).
Cyber and election security
After the 2016 election and evidence of Russian interference, state election officials and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) collaborated to provide improved election security. In the waning days of the Obama administration, U.S. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated elections as a “critical infrastructure.” The Trump administration’s DHS secretaries kept the designation and created the Elections Subsector Government Coordinating Council, which consists of approximately twenty state and local election administrators and a handful of federal officials who together craft U.S. election security policy. 1
The collaboration of the federal government and the states, which the Constitution designates as responsible for managing elections, has been effective in protecting U.S. election systems and databases from foreign actors. Every state belongs to DHS’s Information Sharing and Analysis Center dedicated to elections (EI-ISAC) and receives real-time elections security information. DHS also makes available to states over a dozen cyber security services—including cybersecurity assessment, threat analysis, threat response, and network protections. 2 Indicative of the independence and effectiveness of these programs, the director of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (Chris Krebs) defied Trump by creating a DHS webpage to combat election misinformation and declared the 2020 elections “the most secure in American history.” 3 Although protections against interference in the physical election operations improved, the federal-state partnership has been less effective in limiting foreign misinformation to influence Americans through social media.
The barriers to election fraud
November 2020 brought to national attention the Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who followed the state’s administrative procedures even though they elected Democrats to the White House and the U.S. Senate. His prominence rose after the Washington Post reported his secretly recorded conversation with Trump badgering him to “find” votes to tip the election. As Congress began its process to finalize the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, Raffensperger documented Georgia’s elaborate process to ensure the fair and accurate tabulations of ballots. 4
Raffensperger is a person of integrity who chose not to use his official position to further his or his party’s prospects; but a narrowly personalistic account misses the institutional features of election administration in Georgia and around the country. Any significant effort by Raffensperger to follow Trump’s entreaties to commit fraud to change the outcome would have been detected by postelection procedures, faced the public wrath of nonpartisan election officials, and reversed in court. 5
Administrative checks to ensure fair and accurate elections
Forty-four states require postelection audits in which they conduct rigorous checks and independent reviews of election results and equipment used to tabulate the ballots to reconfirm the election outcome. 6 These are typically conducted before the results are certified, to detect errors before results are finalized. They are almost always undertaken by election officials and poll workers from both political parties, often with state party attorneys observing. Most postelection audits are a partial recount of results in which officials compare the voter-marked paper records to the results tabulated by the ballot scanners. 7 The most common approach is to hand count a set number of ballots (typically several thousand representing a statistically significant percentage of ballots) in each county or local jurisdiction. Those same ballots are then run through one or more of the scanners used in the election. If the hand count and the scanner tabulation are the same (or at least can be reconciled), the election outcome is confirmed. Another approach are statewide risk-limited audits (RLAs), where a number of randomly selected ballots are examined based on turnout and the closeness of the election. For instance, bipartisan judges in Colorado randomly retabulated ballots in the 2020 election without knowing how the scanner originally read the ballot. No scanner errors were found in more than ten thousand ballots reviewed. 8
In 2020, postelection audits confirmed the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election, Senate elections, and every other race on the ballot. Counties in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, among others, conducted recounts of state elections that produced minor vote count changes. In Colorado’s recount of the 18th judicial district attorney race, for instance, 6 votes changed in review of nearly 700,000 ballots, with the Republican candidate winning. 9
Georgia recounted every ballot cast in the state—twice. Because the Georgia presidential outcome was decided by fewer than 12,000 votes, every voter-marked ballot was rescanned and every ballot was hand counted. In the process of hand counting the ballots, three counties discovered that ballot memory cards were erroneously not uploaded, meaning just over 3,300 ballots were not included in the original count. Another county discovered a batch of ballots that were never scanned. That county’s election administrator was fired by the county commission. The result was that Trump gained 3,032 ballots and Joe Biden gained 1,758 ballots, reducing his lead from over 13,000 votes to under 12,000. 10 At the request of the Trump campaign, Raffensperger conducted a second recount, this one by retabulating the ballot using the electronic scanners, that reconfirmed the result, though it diminished Biden’s lead over Trump by a couple of hundred votes to 11,779. 11
Preventing fraud and refuting Trump’s accusations
America’s election administration limits the fraudulent casting of ballots to very low numbers. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, finds that since the 1990s, there have been a total of 1,328 proven instances of voter fraud, 1,143 convictions, and 48 people who received civil penalties. 12 These totals include not just illegal voters or the casting of multiple ballots but also ballot petition fraud and false registrations, which make up the bulk of the list. But even including those, that’s about one hundred cases of proven allegations of elections-related fraud across all fifty states during presidential election years in a three-decade period. The Brennan Center and journalistic investigations reach similar conclusions. There is no credible evidence of significant election fraud. 13
The effectiveness of administrative checks on fraud equipped election officials to blunt Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by testing and credibly rejecting four of his most frequent claims.
–Illegal ballots were “dumped” all at once, early the morning following election day
Trump and his supporters claimed that, first, an unusually high number of ballots suddenly appeared early in the morning after election day and, second, these were not legally cast ballots. The first concern misunderstands how elections are conducted. When polls close on election day, election officials, along with bipartisan teams of election judges, work sometimes for 24 or even 36 straight hours processing ballots. These election totals are then uploaded on a continuous basis after an election, including early the morning after Election Day.
As for the claim that ballots were cast by ineligible voters, there are protections in place to prevent the injection of illegally cast ballots. There are no free-floating or “unassigned” ballots; each voter has a file that indicates if they voted in person or by mail, preventing them from casting multiple ballots. After each election, a “canvass” is conducted: bipartisan teams of election judges and administrators create a report showing how many ballots were issued and received for counting. These numbers should be an exact match and generally are; when a discrepancy does occur, they are typically off by only a handful of ballots out of millions cast.
–Ballots voted by dead or ineligible voters affected the outcome
The election administration system has protections against ballots being cast by dead or ineligible voters. Before the election, the list of eligible voters is “cleaned” of recently deceased, imprisoned, or otherwise ineligible voters.
Despite this, the occasional ineligible voter casts a ballot or an individual may receive two ballots due to a name variation or data delays related to his or her record. It is also the case that a handful of people receive ballots in multiple states and cast both ballots, in violation of federal law. Each of these possible areas of fraud are addressed by a state’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC is a consortium of more than thirty U.S. states that uses a sophisticated data comparison engine to compare data on who votes within and outside the state. This equips each state to determine how many people voted illegally by casting two ballots, voted for a dead voter, or voted in two states.
–Mail ballots allowed for and encouraged widespread voter fraud
The election administration system protects against mail ballot fraud. First, the voter’s residence address is confirmed by the delivery of the ballot. The voter can only receive their ballot if they live at the address on file. If the voter does not live at the address where the ballot was mailed, ballots are returned to the county election office as undeliverable. A ballot cannot be forwarded.
Second, the system of election administration requires personal information from the voter to confirm identity. In most states, the voter’s identity is verified through a signature verification review. Other states require a photocopy of the voter’s ID be included in the return envelope or by the inclusion of witness or notary confirmation. These processes are long-standing, with highly trained election judges of both parties conducting the review. Colorado, for instance, keeps signature review data for each county, flagging those that reject or accept an unusual percentage of signatures.
–Voting system software did not accurately convey voter intent
President Trump’s accusations against Dominion Voting software were at the center of his fraud claims. (The software is installed in election scanners.) Postelection audits in Georgia, Colorado, Nevada, and other states where Dominion Voting software was used showed, however, that election scanners accurately counted the ballots. The president and his surrogates also focused on Smartmatic, the largest voting system provider in the world. What they did not know is that only one U.S. jurisdiction uses Smartmatic software, Los Angeles County in California, which Trump stood no chance of winning. Joe Biden won California by 17 million votes.
Contemporary protections against fraud are stronger than in the past
The protections against fraud today are fundamentally stronger than in the past. Charges of stuffed ballot boxes, repeat voting, and intimidation and violence against voters were common during the nineteenth century and into the first third of the twentieth century (Altschuler and Blumin 2000). Reforms to make voting secret and prevent racial- and class-based disenfranchisement from the mid-nineteenth century to 1930 were bypassed by tampering with voter registration and stealing elections at the ballot box (Kuo and Teorell 2017). Civil rights laws, nonpartisan election administrators, and rigorous administrative rules and practices put an end to the earlier wholesale fraud.
Judicial reviews
The audits and other postelection analyses did not bring the 2020 election to a close, however. Operating parallel to the audits and recounts was the legal strategy by Trump’s campaign and supporters to halt election certifications and create doubt in state election outcomes. They filed—and lost—at least eighty-six lawsuits in multiple states challenging the election process, the counting of ballots, and the certifications. More than ninety judges—including those nominated by Trump—ruled against him. The Supreme Court twice decided by unanimous margins not to review Trump’s lawsuits, leaving in place the decisions of federal and state courts.
Worrisome Consequences of Trump’s Baseless Charges of Fraud
While the legal system and administrative structure of elections repelled Trump’s assaults, his conduct and the reaction of Republican state lawmakers chip away at the credibility and operations of U.S. elections.
The damage of disproven claims
The claims by Trump and his surrogates about Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential contest undermined trust in the fairness of American elections. GOP trust in elections declined sharply near Election Day, from 66 percent on November 1 to 34 percent a week later, according to Morning Consult polling (Laughlin and Shelburne 2021). Nine months after the 2020 elections, 66 percent of Republicans still concluded that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” 14 (By contrast, 42 percent of Democrats doubted the fairness of Trump’s similarly narrow 2016 win, which Clinton conceded.) With Trump fanning distrust in the 2020 presidential election, 47 percent of Republicans reported in August 2021 that a time will come when “patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,” and 55 percent favored the use of force to preserve the “traditional American way of life.” 15
Although the reactions of Republicans to 2020 were considerably sharper than that of Democrats to the 2016 elections, there is a general pattern of concern. Partisans of losing presidential candidates are primed to question the fairness of the process (Sances and Stewart 2015).
State laws
Political competition spurred Democrats and Republicans to alter state laws to their advantage when they controlled the legislature and governorship. Those enacted by Republicans in Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Texas may erode participation in elections, especially among voters of color and those with low-income. While abiding by the legal barriers to withdrawing the qualifications of voters, the laws create a more complicated process by requiring additional steps to verify the identity of the voter casting a mail ballot. The Georgia law permits only one mail ballot drop off location per county and makes it a felony for a county election administrator to violate the law.
While the intent of Republicans is to win the “zero-sum game” against Democrats (as Michael Carvin put it), the actual effect on voting may vary. The new GOP legislation may, as designed, disproportionately dampen participation by voters of color and others and the counting of their ballots. Research by Michael Herron and Daniel Smith (2014) found that Florida’s reduction of its early voting period by six days depressed turnout among racial and ethnic minorities. Another possibility, however, is that new GOP laws may be offset because they provoke a countermobilization by voting rights organizers and the Democratic Party. 16 A working paper found that new laws to require voter identification between 2008 and 2018 failed to depress registration or turnout including among voters of color. Part of the reason is countermobilization—increased contacts by the candidate organizations and Democratic Party (Cantoni and Pons 2021).
The most significant change passed by Republican lawmakers would potentially politicize election administration by shifting control to the legislature or its appointed board. The change could conceivably position the Republican Party in Georgia to control election administration in Democratic counties and, for instance, remove ballots on trivial grounds such as spelling mistakes by Asian or Hispanic voters for whom English is not their first language.
Neverthless, Republican laws to restrict voting may prove difficult to enforce by election officials, fail to have their desired effect, or invite courts to stop or water them down. For instance, Georgia’s law that permits the legislature to take over jurisdictions where election fraud or incompetence is suspected will prove hard to enforce. Not only does a legislative majority need to agree, but certain conditions must exist for a court to permit a takeover. Laws passed in Texas and Alaska to increase barriers to voters with disabilities will likely lose challenges under both the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Help America Vote Act, as courts are reluctant to roll back access already granted to these voters. Laws in Arkansas, Florida, and Montana that limit assistance for mail ballot voters will prove virtually impossible to enforce. Furthermore, several of the more restrictive mail ballot laws likely will hurt Republican more than Democratic voters, as historically Republicans have used mail ballots at a higher percentage than Democrats.
Even if Republican laws fail to alter outcomes, they—along with Trump’s ungrounded claims of fraud—may lock in distrust of elections. Numerous lawsuits and rounds of charges and countercharges will now swirl around declarations about the fairness or integrity of election administration.
Taking Election Administration Seriously
The legal and administrative structures of elections withstood direct assaults in 2020, but there are potentially significant erosions in the area of elections as well as other facets of American public life—including toxic partisanship, intensifying racial antagonisms, widening political inequality, and a breakdown of institutional barriers to antidemocratic candidates (Jacobs, forthcoming).
The analysis in this paper points to three steps to bolster the institutional guardrails of electoral procedures and rules. First, we need a better understanding of election administration. For a number of years, the emphasis has been on participatory and deliberationist views of democracy that tended to take for granted democratic institutions (Pateman 1970; Fishkin 1991). These are valuable debates that lose their priority at a time when studying election administration—the bulwark of democratic procedures—is undertilled and urgently needed (Arnold 1982; but cf. Alvarez et al. 2020; Stewart 2020). 17
Second, universities can play a vital role in the nonpartisan training of election administrators to boost the capacities of election offices and diversify their racial and ethnic composition. The University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs has started the first university certificate in election administration, which is taught online by the nation’s leading election officials. 18
Third, scholars and state officials can collaborate to elevate the visibility of administrative procedures to verify the registration and casting of ballots to counter the misinformation campaigns. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration have publicly showcased their professional, nonpartisan credentials to build confidence in the Coronavirus vaccine. By extension, elections officials should spotlight nonpartisan protections of elections well in advance of Election Day to shine a spotlight on their wide-ranging steps to prevent and check fraud.
Building and protecting the institutions of democracy opens a new chapter for engaged scholars.
Footnotes
Notes
Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Mondale Chair at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. With colleagues, he pioneered the Certificate in Election Administration program. His new book, Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History (Oxford University Press) will be published in March 2022.
Judd Choate is the director of the election division for the Colorado Department of State, former president of the National Association of State Election Directors, and instructor in the Certificate in Election Administration program. He began his career on the political science faculty of the University of Nebraska.