Evaluating Elections: A Handbook of Methods and Standards

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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
R. Michael Alvarez is Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology and Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Alvarez is a Fellow of the Political Methodology Society and is co-editor of the journal Political Analysis. He co-authored Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promise of Digital Democracy (with Thad E. Hall, 2010) and Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting (with Thad E. Hall, 2004). Lonna Rae Atkeson is Professor and Regents' Lecturer in the Political Science Department at the University of New Mexico and Director of the Center for the Study of Voting, Elections, and Democracy. Thad E. Hall is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He co-authored Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promise of Digital Democracy (with R. Michael Alvarez, 2010) and Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting (with R. Michael Alvarez, 2004).

Review :
'Ten years after the passage of the Help America Vote Act, this book offers a refreshing, practical, and constructive approach to evaluating elections and collecting data that can lead to increased integrity, greater transparency, and better overall accountability of our electoral process.' Dean C. Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County, California '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