Evaluating Elections
A Handbook of Methods and Standards

This book explores how the tools of public management and policy evaluation can generate the data to improve elections.

R. Michael Alvarez (Author), Lonna Rae Atkeson (Author), Thad E. Hall (Author)

9781107027626, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 November 2012

180 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

'Professors Alvarez, Atkeson, and Hall have produced a wonderfully clear, insightful, and informative volume that will help anyone interested in improving American elections get the job done. Evaluating Elections relies on the authors' extensive knowledge of election administration, drawn from a decade's worth of highly respected work in the field, to chart out a comprehensive program of data-driven election evaluation. At a time when election administration is prone to capture by political forces, [this book] provides a lucid, science-driven, non-partisan prescription about how to evaluate the elections ecosystem … It is a volume that anyone interested in election administration will want to read, from local election officials to members of Congress. It will undoubtedly incite intense interest among the academic election administration community, which will be inspired to develop further the tools outlined in this volume.' Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In competitive and contested democratic elections, insuring integrity is critical. Evaluating Elections shows why systematic analysis and reporting of election performance is important and how data-driven performance management can be used by election officials to improve elections. The authors outline how performance management systems can function in elections and their benefits for voters, candidates and political parties. Journalists, election administrators and even candidates often ask whether recent elections were run well, whether there were problems in the administration of a particular state's elections and how well elections were run across the country. The authors explain that such questions are difficult to answer because of the complexity of election administration and because there is currently no standard or accepted framework to assess the general quality of an election.

Introduction: performance-based evaluation of election administration
1. The electoral ecosystem
2. Easily available data for performance evaluation
3. Measuring the experiences of voters
4. Measuring the performance of poll workers
5. Auditing the election ecosystem
6. Election observation.

Subject Areas: Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Elections & referenda [JPHF], Political structure & processes [JPH]