Fixing the U.S. Election System: Is a Democracy Index the Answer?

Transcript

TOM MANN: The meltdown in Florida in November 2000 opened the eyes of members of the public and certainly law professors and political scientists about the shortcomings of our system of election administration. As Professor Gerken puts it at the beginning of her book, ballots are discarded, poll workers are poorly trained, registration lists work badly, lines can be too long, machines malfunction, partisan officials change the rules of the game to help themselves and hurt their enemies, election administrators cannot agree on what constitutes a best practice or even whether there is any such thing. Efforts to remedy these flaws have had some successes over the last 8 years, but I think it's fair to say that every one of the problems that emerged out of the 2000 election is still very much with us and in most cases frustrated by intense partisanship. The lenses through which politicians view the problems of election reform and their solutions tend to lead to political standoffs. And localism. We have a highly decentralized system for the administration of elections, something no other democracy in the world can understand. The question is how to fix it.

We haven't done so well. Professor Gerken has an idea. It's an idea built around the whole notion of using transparency rather than commands and in that sense is very much a part of the genre of political reform that is data driven, that relies on competition and shame rather than explicit top-down rules. We can see it in ideas for amicus courts, independent electoral and ethnics commissions and in the whole idea of shadow redistricting commissions. The question before the house today is can a democracy index actually be built? And if it can, will it work as Professor Gerken postulates it will? There are the questions.

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