[EL] making a Democracy Index at the ballot box

[Gerken, Heather]

Dear Doug,

I've made just such a proposal in my book (entitled, conveniently enough, The Democracy Index).   Putting the question on the ballot itself runs one into a set of tricky questions about what's allowed to appear on the ballot.  But that doesn't mean poll workers can't hand out a sheet of paper and do a stand-alone survey with one or two questions on it.

I know of a tiny handful of local administrators who conduct such a survey (Gary Smith of Forsyth County is one of them), but my own research suggests it's decidedly not the norm.  The same is true of reporting how long the lines were - here again, there's no widespread norm.

Best,

Heather

Heather Gerken
J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven CT  06511
ph (203) 432-8022
fax (203) 432-8095




From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Hess
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2012 5:28 PM
To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: [EL] making a Democracy Index at the ballot box

An idea I have thought about before, but not kicked around:

Administrative data resulting from elections and survey data on or around election day provide information that can be used to inform a "Democracy Index" (metrics on the quality of the election process), but what about adding a few questions to the ballot to make it into a mini survey? For instance, after you vote for the candidates, there could be a question that says: How long did you wait in line today? Or whatever. It could then be tabulated and reported with that precinct.

You would not have to ask everybody the same question, or even ask everybody any question. Thus, it wouldn't intrude too much on the voters' time...and it would not make the process at the precinct much longer overall. Randomly distributing ballots within a precinct might be tricky since it is not the usual, but there could be ways to ease this by the printers. Or, it could be a stand-alone survey that people are given at random and submit with their ballot.

Do any states or counties (or have any in the past) have an "election day experience" survey and incorporate it into the election process itself?

On a related note: do precinct directors report data at the end of the day on events at the precinct? E.g., number of people standing in line at certain hours, etc.?

Doug
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