Essay Help : U.S. Election Reform - Essay Samples

U.S. Election Reform - Essay Samples

U.S. Election Reform
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U.S. Election Reform

After the 2000 presidential election, the current debate over election reform began, with a primary focus on voting equipment and on developing procedural remedies for flaws observed in the current election process. Consider, for example, the election reform legislation enacted by Congress--the "Help America Vote Act of 2002". This legislation was primarily designed to provide states with money to purchase new voting equipment and to encourage states to implement a series of specific procedures, such as statewide voter registration systems, voter education programs, and provisional voting.

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

This law and many national and state-level reform efforts typically focused on changing the current election system without considering whether the model of election administration that is used today is appropriate. That is, why do most people vote at polling places on a single day at a single location? Why are voting places sometimes located in private homes and garages, or in private businesses? Why do volunteers or poorly paid people staff these polling places? What are the managerial complexities created by using such an election system? Are there other models for elections that would strengthen the ability of election administrators to control and manage the election process?

Voting is the foundation of our democracy, yet across the nation the implementation of elections is done by amateurs who have little experience--in the most extreme case they have some on-the-job training spread out over several years. Major elections in the United States are held on a single day across the nation, requiring campaign finance reform to gear up in a massive effort to serve their entire community in a single 12-hour time frame. The principal-agent model illustrates that the ability of the electoral system to control the quality of service that is provided to their customer--the voting public--is greatly limited by their inability to carefully select poll workers and to control the activities at poll sites. Even worse, if problems do arise, elections are not an ongoing process in the typical sense. It is not as though the election administrator is in a position to come in the day after the election and work through the problems with the election workers as they do their jobs, as there may not be another election for months, and the same individuals may not staff it. In every election, the electoral system has to make a new set of delegations to poll sites, poll workers, and other parties.

End Notes

1. Deborah White, About.com Guide to US Liberal Politics since 2005, Krugman and White on the Urgent Need for US Election Reform, Friday August 19, 2005 http://usliberals.about.com/b/2005/08/19/krugman-and-white-on-the-urgent-need-for-us-election-reform.htm